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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE NATURE OF GOD 

A Series of Lectures 



By J. A. HALL, D. D. 



PHILADELPHIA, PA.: 

THE LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY 






COPYRIGHT, I9IO, BY 
THE LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY 






©CLA265508 



^N. 



To Her, whose Help and Companionship it has been 

My Privilege Daily to Enjoy, this Volume 

is Gratefully Dedicated 



PREFACE 

The following lectures were delivered before the 
students of Wittenberg Theological Seminary dur- 
ing the winter of 1908 and 1909. They are an 
attempt to present the Christian idea of God as 
opposed to that of philosophy. Between the two 
conceptions there is a fundamental difference. 
Philosophy conceives of God either from the stand- 
point of absolute transcendence or that of helpless 
immanence ; as utterly removed from the world, or 
as lost in it. To the hunger of the soul for a God 
with whom it may hold fellowship, and from whom 
it may derive help, philosophy offers a stone in- 
stead of bread. Man needs a God who in every 
sense of the term is near ; a Being capable of being 
touched with a feeling of our infirmities for the 
reason that He has Himself felt them. It is for a 
quasi-human God that the soul hungers. 

And such a God Christianity alone presents to 
the world. Its conception of God is that of a per- 
sonal Being, who, without doing violence to His 
nature, became incarnate in human flesh and lived 



VI PREFACE. 

among men. It sees in the man Jesus the " gen- 
uine " God, atid acknowledges no other besides 
Him. 

And just this is the secret of the power 'that 
Christianity has over the hearts of men. It is this 
that constitutes the vital element which has ^en- 
abled it to survive all the struggles for existence, 
and to dominate the most cultured peoples of the 
world. In a word, the power of Christianity is in 
its anthropomorphic conception of the Deity. To 
vindicate this conception, and, if possible, to make 
it more real, is the purpose of the following lect- 
ures, John A. Hali,. 



CONTENTS . 



LECTURE FIRST. 

PAGE 

The Failure of Philosophy 9 

LECTURE SECOND. 
Reasons for the Failure 52 

LECTURE THIRD. 
Religion 98 

LECTURE FOURTH. 
The Origin, Seat and Content of Religion ..... 140 

LECTURE FIFTH. 
The Certainty of Religious Knowledge 182 

LECTURE SIXTH. 
Anthropomorphism 222 

LECTURE SEVENTH. 
The Trinity 273 

LECTURE EIGHTH. 
The Same Subject Continued 302 



The Nature of God. 

LECTURE FIRST. 

THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 

The belief that we are not alone in the world is 
practically universal. It would seem that no light 
other than that which " lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world," is necessary to convince 
man of this truth. To live in the world, to share 
its daily experiences, is to feel that we are in contact 
with a Being who is not of us, but above us. Promi- 
nent among these experiences, is the sense of our 
incompleteness. We are neither self-satisfied, nor 
self-sufficient. We need something beyond and above 
to complete our existence ; and this something the 
religious soul finds in God. It is altogether probable 
that, were it not that man is ever haunted by a sense 
of his needs, he would give himself but little con- 
cern as to who or what is above him. It is his needs 
that make him religious. Forces against which 
he is unable to match himself are in league to put 

(9) 



IO THE NATURE OF GOD. 

out his little life, and he must needs have a ref- 
uge. Though yearning for the permanent, he finds 
himself in the midst of the fleeting — his days " even 
as the grass when the wind passeth over it." Sur- 
prised at the fact that no human spirit is able to 
enter fully into his experiences, or even to under- 
stand his longings, he feels the need of an Almighty 
companion. The barrenness of life ; the hunger 
which consumes ; the labors which weary ; the 
fears which inhabit, make God a necessity to man. 
It is out of this sense of his incompleteness that 
the cry for the living God comes. 

But these needs, however profound or universal, 
do not of themselves constitute a sufficent proof of 
the actual existence of God. Taken in themselves, 
they give us no assurance that there is anything in 
the real world which corresponds to them. One 
and all they are subjective, they may or may not 
have their object, and all that we can say of them 
is, that we hope that they may find their answer in 
the outward world of reality. What religion seems 
to need in order that its belief in the existence of God 
may be vindicated is proofs objectively valid and 
which on that account are capable of carrying 
conviction to all men. 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. II 

Now, it is to this task that philosophy adjusts 
itself. It produces arguments for our beliefs, under- 
takes to vindicate them to the understanding, and 
by so doing attempts to establish faith upon a 
rational basis. And this it professes to do in the inter- 
est of religion itself. For if God exists, as religion 
affirms, ought not that fact to be once and for all 
established ? Ought it not to be made clear to all ? 
Ought not a fact which so vitally concerns man in 
all his relations to be logically demonstrated ; or, to 
say the least, made as palpable as are those of science 
or mathematics ? Yet it is not so. Face to face with 
a universe in which some behold God, others stand 
looking in vain for evidences of His presence. A 
Kepler, feeling himself to be "thinking God's 
thoughts after him " is followed by a Mill, to whom 
the world is devoid of either thought or purpose. 
To some God is most real ; the companion of their 
sorrows, the sharer of their joys. 

" Closer is He than breathing, and nearer 
Than hands and feet. ' ' 

To others no sign has ever appeared, no voice 
spoken, or presence made itself felt. To some the 
arguments for the Divine existence are logical and 



12 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

seem to leave no way of escape. To others they 
have no meaning and are utterly without power to 
carry conviction. 

Yet there are facts concerning which all are 
agreed. No one denies the existence of those mate- 
rial objects by which our senses are affected. No 
one disputes the deductions of the mathematician 
who by logical processes reasons out his conclu- 
sions. These facts are universal ; they appeal to all, 
and the mind accepts them because it must. In 
these departments no one thinks as he chooses, 
nothing is obscure, there are no vital differences 
of opinion. And the reason is, that in both of these 
fields there is the possibility of demonstration and 
proofs are objectively valid. Mathematics proves 
itself and science verifies its facts by experiment. 
But it is not so with the great facts of religion. In 
the main they are subjective, private and even vari- 
able. 

Now, the attainment of just this objective and 
universal certainty for the facts of religion is the 
aim of philosophy. To find a way of escape from 
obscure and personal persuasion to truth objectively 
valid ; in a word, to redeem religion from privacy 
and to give public status and universal right of way 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 3 

to its deliverances ; this is the task which philosophy 
assumes. It matters not that long ago, Job declared 
a knowledge of God to be beyond the realm traversed 
by the unassisted reason when he affirmed that by 
u searching " God could not be found. Nor is it 
sufficient that millions of the sanest among men 
and women have testified with Job, " I know that my 
Redeemer liveth." Nor is it even enough that many 
have willingly yielded the mystery of life in witness 
of the fact that, to them God has not been a mere 
vision, but a reality, more real than any object known 
by the outward sense. What philosophy seeks is 
not private testimony, but rational demonstration ; 
objective proofs which cannot be disputed and 
which are valid for all. 

Now, it may as well be admitted in the beginning 
that the existence of God cannot be logically demon- 
strated. We cannot deduce by self-evident logic 
that which has no self-evident axioms behind it. 
The world and self and God, are alike in being final 
postulates of thought, yet the existence of neither 
is capable of demonstration. Proofs there are in 
plenty ; but they are not those which hold in the 
realm of either mathematics or logic. 

But it is not our purpose at present to enter into a 



14 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

criticism of the method pursued by philosophy in its 
attempt to prove the existence of God. It is rather 
that of showing what it has not done ; for it is certain 
that it has utterly failed in its aim. By searching it 
has not found out God, or succeeded in removing the 
thick darkness which has always hidden Him from 
the cold intellect of man. It has not convinced the 
skeptic of the truths of Theology, and men still, as 
in the past, are compelled to look to religion for 
whatever knowledge they may have of the being 
of the One who has ever hidden Himself from the 
"wise and prudent." In spite of its pretentions, 
philosophy has thrown but little, if any, light upon 
that most important question, Wliatis God? Un- 
able to satisfy itself even of His existence, it surely 
can have nothing to tell us concerning His nature. 
That it has failed to prove the existence of God, I 
think will be admitted by all who have made them- 
selves acquainted with its results. " I need not," 
says Professor James, " discredit philosophy by 
laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice 
to show that, as a matter of history, it fails to prove 
its pretensions to be objectively convincing. In 
fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish 
differences. I believe, in fact, that the logical 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 5 

reason of man operates in the field of divinity ex- 
actly as it operates in love, or patriotism, or in poli- 
tics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life in 
which our passions or mystical intuitions fix our 
beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our con- 
victions, for, indeed, it has to find them. It ampli- 
fies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends 
it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders 
it. It cannot now secure it." 

Let us now look at some of the more positive 
results which have been attained by speculative 
philosophy. As to its achievements, it has given 
to the world three arguments in proof of the neces- 
sary existence of God. They are known as the 
cosmological, the teleological and the ontological. 
Kant held that, in these three arguments there is 
summarized all the proofs that can be offered from 
the logical side for the existence of a Supreme 
Being. I quote from his " Critique." " There are 
only three modes of proving the existence of a 
Deity on the grounds of the speculative reason. 
All the paths conducting to this end, either begin 
from determinate experience and the peculiar con- 
stitution of the world of sense, and rise, according 
to the law of causality, from it to the highest cause 



1 6 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

existing apart from the world — or from a purely in- 
determinate experience — that is, some empirical 
existence or abstraction is made of all experience, 
and the existence of a supreme cause is concluded 
from a priori conceptions alone. The first is the 
physico-theological argument ; the second, the cos- 
mological ; the third, the ontological. More there 
are not and more there cannot be." Later on we 
shall learn what Kant himself thought of these 
arguments. Meanwhile, let us get them before our 
minds, in order that we may see what they contain. 
Let us begin with the. cosmo logical. 

Reduced to its simplest terms it is this : The con- 
tingent world exists ; or the world of our imme- 
diate experience is contingent. Therefore, an 
absolutely necessary Being exists. For how is that 
which is dependent to be explained except in the 
light of that which is independent ; or how is that 
which is manifestly an effect, to be accounted for, 
except in the light of that which is uncaused ? The 
argument starts from the thought that the world, as 
presented to our experience, has in it not substantial- 
ity or independence. It exists ; but its existence can- 
not be explained from itself, and the mind, in trying 
to account for it, is forced to fall back on something 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 7 

outside of the world and finds rest only in the idea 
of a Being, who is necessary, self-dependent and 
substantial. 

Permit me, if possible, to state the argument in 
a form a little less abstract. Experience proves 
that effects have their causes. We speak of any 
particular effect, and say that back of it there must 
have been a cause. We know that things do not 
happen of themselves ; they are not what they are 
for any reason to be found in them ; they suggest, 
even demand a cause. But we do not stop there, 
because we cannot. We inquire into the cause of 
any effect, and reason that it, too, must have had a 
cause. And so on, until we reach a cause which is 
not caused, or what is the same, a final cause. This 
final cause, we assume to be God. I do not mean 
to say that, we actually trace effects to their causes 
until we reach the primitive cause. That would be 
impossible. For in the regress we come to an 
abyss, an abyss which cannot be crossed except by a 
leap, and that leap the mind takes, because on this 
side and in the realm of the finite and contingent 
it cannot rest. And the essence of the argument 
is that the mind must rest somewhere. Thought 
cannot go on forever tracing effects to causes, only 



1 8 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

to discover that these causes are themselves effects 
without end. Somewhere the process must end. 
Reason requires that it must end. Thought, in 
simple exhaustion, must pause ; and since it can 
pause nowhere else, it postulates a final cause and 
assumes it to be the cause of itself. God, then, is a 
necessity to thought. Looking out on the con- 
tingent, convinced that the contingent cannot rest 
on the contingent, but must have its explanation 
in the incontingent, thought affirms the incon- 
tingent and names it God. 

Of course, this argument is capable of being car- 
ried very much further. For the mind requires not 
only a cause ; it requires a sufficient cause. Accord- 
ingly it has been affirmed that, this final cause can- 
not, in the nature of the case, be a blind cause, but, 
on the contrary, one which is ever working to some 
conscious and rational end. By this is meant that it 
must explain all that is in the effect. If, for illus- 
tration, it is once admitted that the effect is intel- 
ligent, or moral, or good, the inference is that the 
cause must also have been intelligent, or moral, or 
good, as the case may be. And that is to say, that 
the cause of anything must at the same moment 
that it is a cause be also a sufficient cause. It must 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 9 

explain all that is in the effect. Accordingly, if 
the effect is intelligent the cause must also have 
been intelligent. If the effect is moral, the cause 
must have been moral, and so on. 

Standing in the presence of a statue of Michael 
Angelo, one needs not be told that the hand which 
guided the chisel was directed by intelligence and 
governed by imagination true to the highest art. 
The effect proves it. No blind force ; no force 
operating by chance, could have produced a work 
of art which so expresses thought or incarnates in- 
telligent imagination. No one needs to be told 
that the steamship, in every movement responsive 
to the helm, is the product of intelligence. The 
effect proves it. It is so everywhere. So far as our 
observation goes, we seem warranted in saying that, 
the cause of any effect must have been a suffi- 
cient cause ; that is, sufficient to produce that par- 
ticular effect. 

Thus, the one who on looking out on the world 
finds intelligence in it, is justified in the conclusion 
that its final cause must have been intelligent. 
The one to whom the world is good, seems to be 
warranted in the conclusion that the cause must 
also have been good ; for what is in the effect^must 



20 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

have been first in the cause. And thus, to the final 
cause, has been attributed that intelligence, benev- 
olence and love which religion attributes to God. 
Of course, by the one who finds in the world no 
intelligence, to whom things appear unrelated and 
haphazard, the conclusion that the final cause must 
have been wise, will not be drawn. To a Schopen- 
hauer, or to one of his class, to whom the universe is 
faulty, a mistake or even a moral blunder, no proof of 
goodness or wisdom is to be derived from an out- 
look on the world. Rather the contrary. For it 
is not until you find intelligence or goodness in the 
effect that you are warranted in postulating it of 
the cause. Practically, therefore, the argument 
from sufficient cause can be of weight to those 
alone to whom the world is a product of goodness ; 
but it is utterly without meaning to the one in 
whose mind these supposed facts themselves need 
corroborative evidence. Indeed, it may be ques- 
tioned whether our knowledge of the universe at 
any point, is sufficient to warrant us in saying that 
its author is either good or wise. It is rather our 
confidence in His goodness and wisdom that fur- 
nishes the basis of our confidence in the goodness 
and wisdom of the world. As a matter of fact, we 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 21 

believe in the goodness of the world, because of our 
belief in the goodness of its author, and not the 
goodness of the world that leads us to the convic- 
tion that, its author must have been either good or 
wise. 

Such, as briefly as I can state it, is the " cosmo- 
logical " argument for the necessary being of God, 
and such the highway, along which a certain school 
of philosophers would bring us to the height from 
which we may behold the One whom we name 
God. 

Let us now see what this argument is logically 
worth. Concerning its real significance we will 
have something to say further on ; for its value as 
a proof of the Divine existence is not in its logical 
force. And it is as a logical proof alone that we 
are to consider it. We have seen that it proceeds 
from effect to cause. It affirms that every effect 
must have its cause, and when carried further it 
arrives at the conclusion that every effect must have 
had an adequate cause. I think you will pardon 
me for saying that, all this is but assumption. It 
is true that so far as our experience goes, it may be 
affirmed with reasonable certainty that, every effect 
has had its cause. But who can affirm with cer- 



22 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

tainty that, in the entire realm of realities or in 
all possible experiences this must have been the 
case? Besides, the argument is an appeal to ex- 
perience, the very thing above which philosophy 
seeks to lift us. 

But let that be as it may, the argument crum- 
bles under the vigorous grasp of the very logic 
to which it appeals. For what, at last, are these 
effects of which it is assumed that they point back 
to an infinite cause ? Are they not all finite effects ? 
Iyet us own that the universe upon which we look 
is vast ; vast beyond our comprehension. Still it 
is finite. And by no logic can an infinite cause be 
deduced from an effect which is finite. Finite 
effects at best argue only finite causes. They can- 
not prove more. An infinite cause may, indeed, go 
out in finite effects, but finite effects can never 
prove an infinite cause. You cannot in a syllogis- 
tic demonstration get into your conclusion more 
than the premises already contain. Beginning with 
an infinite or absolute cause, you may conclude 
finite effects ; but you can never reverse the proc- 
ess. All that you can infer from a finite or con- 
tingent effect, is a finite or contingent cause, or, at 
most, an endless series of such causes. But if be- 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 23 

cause the mind cannot rest in this false infinity, you 
try to stop the regress and assert at any point of it 
a cause which is not an effect, which is its own 
cause, or which is unconditioned and infinite, the 
conclusion in this case is purely arbitrary. 

But that is not all. For when the question is 
asked, " By what right does the mind stop in its re- 
gress at some particular point and refuse to proceed 
further backward in its search for still remoter 
causes," the arbitrariness of the procedure at once 
appears. There is absolutely no valid reason which 
can be given to justify us in stopping anywhere. It 
is just as pertinent to ask the cause of this final 
cause as it is to ask the cause of any effect in the 
series. True, it may be said that the mind itself is 
unable to go further ; that it must rest somewhere, 
and for this reason it may claim the right to postu- 
late a final cause. But that is not admissible. To 
drag in, because of shere mental incapacity to go 
on thinking, that false infinity, which is merely an 
infinite series of unites, a name, which seems to 
indicate a true infinity, is simply to conceal under 
a phrase the breakdown in the argument. 

And then, too, as science has advanced, causes 
have been pushed further backward. The idea of 



24 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

secondary causes was at one time foreign to men's 
thoughts. The thunder was God's voice ; the 
clouds His chariot ; the storm His breath. Every 
effect was directly traced to God, and secondary 
causes were unthought. But God has now been 
found to stand further back, if indeed He stands 
anywhere. The thunder has been traced to natural 
causes ; the clouds and storms have been traced to 
agencies other than supernatural, and those phe- 
nomena which once heralded the approaching foot- 
steps of the infinite God, have themselves been 
found to have been caused by agencies purely 
natural. By what authority, then, does the mind 
stop at any point and say, " Here secondary causes 
end ; this is the first ; back of this there is no re- 
moter cause." The method is purely arbitrary ; or, 
perhaps it would be more charitable to say, as I have 
already indicated, that this pause in the regress 
marks the utter exhaustion of the mind. But is 
there in that fact any logical authority ? Just as 
well might one, looking out on the horizon which 
shuts out his further vision, affirm that, beyond no 
sky stretches and no landscape lies in the sunlight 
for the reason that, he is unable to see further, as to 
affirm that, because the mind cannot follow a series 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 25 

of infinite causes, there is none beyond the one 
which he arbitrarily names the first. That may 
prove that limits are set to the mind ; but the proof 
of that is one thing, and the proof of a final cause 
quite another. 

And so the cosmological argument is powerless 
to force conviction. As an objective or logical 
proof it utterly fails. Of course, to one already 
possessed of a belief in the existence of a Divine 
Being, it may be helpful, for it may serve to corrobo- 
rate a fact already accepted. But to one devoid of 
such conviction it is without value. The truth is 
that, this argument has been scorned by skeptics 
and flaunted in the face of religion as an illustra- 
tion of the insecure rational basis upon which, as 
we are told, the whole fabric of religious belief 
rests. 

But we must now take up the second argument, 
in which a logical demonstration of the being of 
God is attempted. In our books of theology it is 
usually designated as the teleological proof. Per- 
haps by no writer has it been set forth with great- 
er skill and power than by the eminent divine 
and philosopher, Archdeacon Paley. You will re- 
call the numerous instances of design to which he 



26 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

calls attention in the human body, in plant and in- 
sect life, and more especially in his argument from 
the watch ; for until recently his works, along with 
those of Butler's, were the text-books in most of 
the English and American institutions of learning. 
It cannot be denied that in the realm of apologetics 
he did valiant service. For while on its practical 
side it was the great religious awakening which be- 
gan in the work of the Wesley s and Whitfield, yet 
on its intellectual side, it was the works of Butler 
and Paley that broke the power of Deism in Eng- 
land. But it was in his " Evidences " that Paley 
did his best work. Nevertheless, in the realm of 
philosophy, in which he became the champion of 
the argument from design, he left the world little, 
if indeed anything, of permanent value. His reason- 
ing, as all reasoning based on a particular class of 
facts, is one-sided. It makes the most of those in 
which design seems to be present, and utterly 
ignores the opposite, in which it seems just as cer- 
tain to be wanting. It was the pictorial representa- 
tion which he gave to his argument rather than his 
fair dealing with the facts, just as they present 
themselves, which gave to his treatise its hold on 
the popular mind in the century just past. 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 2*] 

Stated in its simplest form, his argument is this : 
Design points to a designer ; thought to a thinker ; 
purpose to a purposer. Wherever thought, design 
or purpose can be shown in a product, we may logic- 
ally infer that such thought or purpose or design 
must have existed in the mind of the thinker before 
it took shape in the product. 

Now, it is assumed that the universe about us in- 
dicates such purpose or design. Harmony exists 
everywhere. Part fits into part, just as the various 
parts of the watch fit into each other and all con- 
tribute severally to the end which the watchmaker 
had in mind at the time of its construction. From 
the plant to the insect ; from the insect to man, and 
from man to the universe, it is possible to trace the 
golden thread of design, running through all and 
binding all together. As in the watch, there is pre- 
sented a mechanism in which wheels and pinions 
and springs are related and in which each con- 
tributes its individual part, so in the world. Specific 
instances of design are emphasized. The eye, with 
its wondrous lenses, able so to adjust themselves to 
varying distances as that a perfect image is always 
produced on the retina. The ear, marvelously 
adapted to the work of receiving as well as record- 



28 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

ing impressions. The plant, powerless to roam 
from place to place in search of food ; yet so con- 
structed as to be able to secure it from the air and 
soil. The insect, riding on swift wings, carrying in 
its little form a mechanism more wonderful than 
any which the skill of man has yet achieved. In 
the seas, kissing the continents ; the titanic mount- 
ain condensers which force from the laden clouds 
their moisture ; the positions which they occupy in 
relation to the continents — yea, in everything it is 
possible for the mind to trace the evidences of de- 
sign, the proofs of the wisdom and the skill of the 
Being who is the author of all. 

Let us own that, devout minds everywhere have 
been impressed by the, same thought when con- 
templating the universe. In the rocks, a Hugh 
Miller finds the " Footsteps of the Creator." In the 
flowers, a Ruskin traces His pencil, and a Tennyson 
His tender care. In the worlds, keeping time in the 
mighty chambers of the invisible, a Kepler, sees the 
wisdom of a Supreme Being and feels himself to 
be " thinking God's thoughts after Him." But 
since thought argues a thinker, since design argues 
a designer, and purpose a purposer, how are these 
evidences of purpose and design to be explained 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 29 

except on the admission of an intelligent designer 
back of all, and who, before the morning stars 
sang together, thought out the vast scheme ? Just 
as the watch proves the thinker, so the world, teem- 
ing with exhibitions of thought, proves the infinite 
thinker. 

Such is the argument from design and such the 
method of the teleological argument. I almost 
wish that fidelity to the truth would permit of our 
passing this argument by without adverse criticism. 
To me, as a boy, it gave speech to the world, and 
to many it has served as a sheet anchor which has 
preserved faith when threatened by the mad waves 
of skeptical criticism. Yet for all that, it is not 
with beautiful theories that the citadel of religion 
is to be defended against weapons wrought in the 
furnace of hard facts. Pictorial, spectacular, re- 
quiring but little effort on the part of the mind to 
grasp its significance, the argument from design 
has now been laid aside, like some old piece of 
armor, good enough in its day, but of little value 
as a means of defence against weapons of modern 
warfare. I think I am safe in saying that, it has 
been abandoned by most, if not all, thinkers who 
have kept pace with the march of investigation and 



30 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

who have been willing to allow rigorous logic to do 
its work with the fondest of their theories. For 
it must not be forgotten that, the real purpose of the 
argument in question is not that of confirming an 
opinion already held, but, on the contrary, of con- 
vincing the skeptic. And for this purpose the 
design argument has ceased to be of service. In- 
deed, in the form in which it was formerly pre- 
sented it is no longer of value. As a logical argu- 
ment — and this is what it was meant to be — it proves 
nothing. Indeed, on the contrary, it is capable of 
doing immense injury to the very faith which it is 
meant to defend. 

L,et me remind you again that logically no con- 
clusion can be drawn from any syllogism which is 
not already contained in the premise. No castle 
has ever yet been built in the air. It needs the 
solid ground upon which to rest. It is so with any 
conclusion which may be drawn from premises. It 
must rest solidly in them, be contained in them. 
The premise must first be true, or at least accepted 
as true, before it can be expected to bear the weight 
of the conclusion. 

Now, in this argument from design, the premise 
is the very thing that needs to be proven. It must 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 3 1 

not be assumed. It is true, if the universe contains 
design, the conclusion is warranted that it must 
have had a designer. But are we certain of that ? 
Are we certain that, we have not read into the world 
and into our own lives an idea which has existence 
in the mind alone ? Coming to nature with the 
belief that, an All-wise Being has created it, it is easy 
enough to see multitudinous evidences of creative 
skill, for it is never hard to find that for which we 
are seeking. It is not hard for one to whom life 
has brought its numerous charms and to whose 
labor a harvest of reward has been given, to see 
design, or what he calls providence, in all his affairs. 
Few among those who have been fairly successful 
and of whose creed the being of God is a part, 
would deny that they have been greatly favored of 
heaven. Such are sure to speak of providences 
in their life and to point to many instances of a 
kind and wise providence. But how is it when the 
contrary has been the case ? How is it when the 
experience of Job is repeated and the swift mes- 
sengers come bearing heavy tidings of combined 
misfortune ? How is it when our harvests are 
smitten with blight and our cattle w T ith murrain 
and the fire from heaven hath burned up the sheep 



32 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

and the servants and consumed them ? How is it 
when sore boils cover the body, turning our days 
into nights and our hopes into despair ? How is it 
when the fruits of our toil vanish as the smoke and 
hope dies into embers and then into ashes upon the 
hearth ? I know that, even such experiences do not 
disprove a providence, and that through joys and 
sorrows, through sorrows and joys, this providence 
must lead if we are to come out of the furnace 
purified as the gold. I know that our " light afflic- 
tions which endure but for a moment work for us 
a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." 
But that is dragging into the discussion something 
which is utterly foreign to it. For we are not now 
speaking of what revelation teaches, but of what 
nature teaches concerning this matter of design. 
For how is it, when the one who is not convinced 
of the existence of a wise and good God turns his 
eyes to the world and to our experiences in it ? To 
such a mind design is by no means obvious, or at 
least not intelligent or benevolent design, and this 
is the only kind of design which can be taken into 
account in the argument. To some the world is a 
great blunder, and to others existence is unbearable. 
Man, in the words of the Psalmist, " is born to 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 33 

trouble as the sparks fly upward." In pain we are 
born into the world. Our first vocal utterance is a 
cry, and from the cradle to the grave sorrow, dis- 
appointment, heaviness of heart and pain, which at 
times amounts to agony, are the experiences of the 
noblest and the best. Riches take wings and fly 
away ; fame is a breath ; youth and health and pleas- 
ure vanish. Back of everything, is the great specter 
of universal death — the all-encompassing darkness. 
No wonder that the wisest of the ancients asked, 
" What profit hath a man of all the labors which 
he taketh under the sun ? I looked on all the works 
that my hands had wrought, and, behold, all was 
vanity and vexation of spirit. For what befalleth 
the sons of men befalleth beasts ; as the one dieth, 
so dieth the other. Truly the light is sweet, and a 
pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. 
But if a man live years, and rejoices in them all, 
yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they 
are many." 

And such, has been the experience of many 
among those whose lives of unselfish devotion to 
others, have sweetened suffering and made experi- 
ence bearable. 

Robert Louis Stevenson thus writes : " There is 
3 



34 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

indeed one element in human destiny. Whatever 
else we are intended to do, we are not intended to 
succeed. Failure is the lot allotted." Think of 
Dante, solitary of soul on account of his lost 
Beatrice. So much the victim of sorrow as that 
even the children of Florence said, " If anyone has 
ever been in hell he has." Think of the noble 
Kossuth, sacrificing all for the sake of his country, 
yet receiving the reward of banishment. Think of 
the Italian patriot, Mazzini, on whose soul rested 
the bleeding form of oppressed Italy. Of Gustavus 
Adolphus, dying on the bloody field of L,utzen, offer- 
ing his life for that, which as it would seem should 
be the inalienable right of every man. Think of 
Washington, kneeling amid the snows of Valley 
Forge, with soul pierced through by the suffering 
of the heroes of the Revolution, yet suffering all for 
the sake of that which ought to be man's without the 
price of blood. Think of the holiest of the Holy, 
crying out in the garden, " My soul is exceeding 
sorrowful even unto death "; and later on the cross, 
though most innocent, yet speaking His agony in 
the words, " My God, my God, why hast Thou for- 
saken me ? " 

Think of all the noble whose lives have been a 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 35 

tragedy ; and then ask, what becomes of the argu- 
ment that, life and the experiences which enter into 
it, attest a benevolent and merciful Being who is the 
author of all that comes to man ? The truth is, that 

11 History's pages but record 
One death-grapple in the darkness twixt false systems and the 

word. 
Truth forever on the scaffold; wrong forever on the throne." 

I know the answer which will come to all this ; 
and which has a right to come from the religious 
side. I know that one who had suffered much spoke 
of the effect which his afflictions would have in 
the working out for him " a crown of righteousness." 
But it was because he already believed in the exist- 
ence of a benevolent Being who was able to bring 
such a result out of his bitter experiences. It was 
that fact, already accepted, which shot its rays of 
light into the terrible darkness and which enabled 
him rightly to interpret the meaning of his trials. 
But Paul never reasoned, nor has anyone ever 
reasoned from his suffering to the being of a benev- 
olent God. It is the being of God already accepted 
that reconciles us to the strange fact of suffering, 
and not the suffering that points to a benevolent 
and all perfect Being. 



$6 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

But what is more, each specific instance of de- 
sign may be opposed by another in which, to say the 
least, no benevolent purpose seems to be present. 
It cannot be denied that nature is full of anomalies 
and maladaptations. In every part of the animal 
world we find implements of torture surpassing in 
devilish ingenuity everything that was ever seen in 
the dungeons of the Inquisition. We are introduced 
to a scene of incessant and universal strife of which 
it is not apparent on the surface that the outcome 
is the good or happiness of anything sentient. 
Often we find the higher life wantonly sacrificed to 
the lower, as instanced by the myriads of parasites 
apparently created for no other purpose than to prey 
on creatures better than themselves. 

Well, in the face these facts, what is to be thought 
of the argument from design? L,et us own that 
instances of wondrous skill are not wanting which 
seem to point to an intelligent designer. But what 
is to be said of those instances in which such design 
seems not only wanting but which even go so far in 
maladaptation and cruelty as to lead to the conviction 
that if purpose existed at all that purpose must 
have been misery and wretchedness instead of 
happiness ? As a matter of fact, this argument from 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 37 

design is a sword with two edges capable of cleaving 
in a direction trie very opposite of that intended by 
its advocates. For if order, according to the logic 
of the argument, points to a God of order, does not 
disorder point with equal certainty to a God of 
disorder ? If happiness suggests a being delighting 
in the joy of His creation, does not pain, with the 
same logic, suggest a God cruel, delighting in the 
wretchedness of His creatures ? 

Mill, was logically right in holding that the argu- 
ment proved too much, and when he pointed out the 
fact that the design argument was destructive of the 
very cause which it was meant to defend. 

Moreover, the argument is defective for another 
reason. For when evil is taken into account, one 
or the other horn of the dilemma must be chosen ; 
either that God is not benevolent or that, He is not 
omnipotent. For if He is omnipotent, why did He 
not exercise His omnipotence in the prevention 
of evil ? The fact that He has not done so, to say 
the least, awakens suspicion that He is not benev- 
olent ; and contrariwise, the fact that evil exists, 
admitting that God is benevolent, throws suspicion 
on the claim that God is omnipotent, either of 
which conclusions leaves Him a being unworthy 



38 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

of our trust aud devoid of a just claim upon our 
worship. 

Nor. does it help the case to say that, evil has its 
origin in the material with which God had to deal 
and out of which all things have been formed. It 
is true that, in the case of a finite mechanic, intract- 
able material may hide a multitude of sins. All 
would accept the excuse of a mechanic were he to 
say in apology for his defective work, " I could do 
no better out of the material at hand." But not 
so in the case of an Infinite constructor. Such a 
one is responsible for the nature of the material as 
well as for what He makes out of it, for He alone 
has created both the material and fashioned it. He 
cannot so excuse Himself for the fault or blemish 
for the reason that both are his own. Face to face 
with the old problem of evil, the design argument 
breaks down. Logically it cannot be made to 
sustain the weight of the terrible fact that evil is 
everywhere. 

And so the carpenter theory of the world has to 
be abandoned. Its inherent weakness has retired it 
from the arena in which it once figured in defence 
of the Christian faith. Even among those who yet 
look upon it with favor it is rapidly giving way 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 39 

before a better conception of the divine method in 
relation to created things ; I mean the conception 
which gives ns an immanent God, a God never 
apart as is the carpenter from his work, but, on the 
contrary, ever present in it as its director, as well as 
transcendent as its creator. But this brings us to 
the last argument in which a logical demonstration 
of the existence of God is attempted ; I mean the 
ontological. 

Now, I have no hesitancy whatever in saying that, 
when rightly understood, the ontological is the most 
profound of all the proofs which have as yet come 
from the side of philosophy in defence of the great 
truth of religion. But it is not such for the reason 
that it looks outward, for this is its weakness. In- 
deed, the value of the ontological defence is to be 
found in the fact that when rightly interpreted it 
does not look outward, but, on the contrary, inward 
on the human spirit, the realm to which the mind 
must at last look if it is to behold the vision of 
God. My purpose in calling attention to it here is, 
however, to present it solely on its logical side and 
to range it with those proofs which a rational phi- 
losophy has thought out in, defence of the divine 
existence. Presenting it, therefore, as a logical 



4-0 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

argument, the substance of the ontological defence 
is this. Man thinks God, and the thought of God 
is itself a demonstration of His actual existence. 
Because we think Him He is, for were He not, the 
mind acting under the laws which govern thought 
could not think Him. By different writers the 
argument has been presented in different forms. 
As stated by Anselm, it amounted to this : The 
idea of an absolutely perfect being exists in the 
mind. The idea is real accordingly. What stands 
for the idea is also real. He actually exists, for if 
He did not we could conceive another who does 
exist and' who would, therefore, be more perfect. 
As stated by Descartes, it takes the form of an 
argument from efficient cause. We have the idea 
of infinite perfection. But how came we to possess 
this idea ? It is certain that it has not been sug- 
gested by anything in the world or by our sensuous 
experiences. All with which we are brought into 
relation is finite and imperfect. The eye has never 
beheld a perfect object, the ear has never heard a 
perfect harmony ; perfection is not in the world. 
" The depth saith it is not in me, and the sea saith 
it is not in me. It cannot be gotten for gold, 
neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof." 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 41 

And so the idea of infinite perfection, since noth- 
ing in the world can possibly have originated it, is 
held to imply the existence of a perfect being as its 
author and inspirer. As to this idea of a Being abso- 
lutely perfect, Descartes held that it is innate. " I 
have not drawn it," says he, "from the senses, nor 
is it even presented to me unexpectedly, as is usual 
with the ideas of sensible objects when these are 
presented or appear to be presented to the external 
organs of sense. It is not even a pure production 
or fiction of my mind, for it is not in my power to 
take from it or to add to it. And consequently 
there remains but one alternative, that it is innate 
in the same way as the idea of myself. And in 
truth, it is not to be wondered at that God at my 
creation implanted the idea in me that it might 
serve, as it were, for the mark of the workman 
impressed on his work." 

To be sure, in a statement necessarily as brief as 
the present, the full force of the ontological argu- 
ment cannot be brought out. It is only as one fol- 
lows its development as carried forward in the medi- 
tations of Descartes that its full significance as a 
logical argument can be appreciated. But logical 
as it was, it failed to carry conviction. For five 



42 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

hundred years after its statement by Anselm no 
notice was taken of it, and it was the influence of 
Descartes that gave it its rank among the arguments 
for the being of God. But its weakness is at once 
apparent when the question is asked, whether there 
exists a necessary relation between our ideas and 
outward realities. Let us own that the mind pos- 
sesses the idea of infinite perfection ; that in thought 
we are ever referring the imperfect to an ideal which 
is perfect. Does that fact prove that, this perfect 
idea has in reality an objective existence? In other 
words, is there such a relation between subjective 
thought and objective reality as that, that which is 
clearly thought must in reality also exist? Are 
there not many ideas present to the mind for which 
no corresponding realities are to be found ? Now, 
if somehow a necessary relation could be established 
between the subjective ideas of the mind and object- 
ive reality, so that what is thought becomes actual 
in fact, it would be easy enough to proceed from 
the thought of God to His actual existence. But, 
alas ! no such necessary relation exists. 

In his famous illustration of the " Lost Island," 
Gaunilo once and for all broke the force of the 
ontological argument. " Some say," says Gaunilo, 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 43 

" that there is somewhere in the ocean an island 
which, as it is difficult, or rather impossible, to dis- 
cover what does not exist, is known as the Lost 
Island. It is fabled to be more amply supplied with 
riches and all delights in immense abundance 
than the Fortunate Islands themselves. And al- 
though there is no owner or inhabitant, yet in every 
way it excels all inhabited lands in the abundance 
of things which might be appropriated as wealth. 
Now, let anyone tell me this and I shall easily 
understand all that he says. But if he then pro- 
ceeds to infer : " You can no longer doubt this most 
excellent of islands, which you do not doubt to 
exist in your understanding, is really in existence 
somewhere, because it is more excellent to be in 
reality than in the understanding only, and, unless 
it were in existence, any other land which does 
exist would be more excellent than it, and so that 
which you have understood to be the best of isl- 
ands would not be the best." If, I say, he wishes in 
this way to compel me to assent to the existence of 
this island and to suppose that there can be no more 
doubt about it, either I shall consider that he is in 
jest, or I shall not know which I ought to consider 
to be more foolish, myself if I grant it to him, or 



44 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

him if he thinks that he has, with any certainty at 
all, proved the existence of that island. He must 
first have shown me that its very excellence is the 
excellence of a thing really and indubitably exist- 
ing, and not in any degree the excellence of some- 
thing false or dubious in my understanding." 

Nor does it seem that, even Descartes himself was 
persuaded of the validity of the argument. The 
struggle which he had to convince himself of its 
soundness is almost pathetic. Sometimes we find 
him staking all knowledge simply on the clearness 
and distinctness of the deliverances of reason. And 
then again, we find him losing his anchorage in 
reason and confessing, " I trust to clear reason, be- 
cause it is from God, who, being perfect, cannot 
deceive." At last he owns that, it is from a belief 
in God's existence already within him that he started 
out to find by reason the proofs of His actual exist- 
ence in objective reality. That, instead of reason 
finding its own way to the being of God, it is at 
last a God, already postulated, that gives to reason 
its authority to affirm His real being. 

And so this argument, like all others based on 
the deliverances of reason alone, fails to carry con- 
viction. It points to the darkness rather than to 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 45 

the light in which God dwells. Kant laughed the 
argument out of court on its logical side when he 
said, that the notion that he might have of three 
hundred dollars did not put them into his purse. 

Of course, it must not be thought that this great 
thinker did not see more in the ontological argu- 
ment than one would infer from the sarcastic way in 
which he dealt with it. For he did. He made the 
truth which it contains, the foundation of the argu- 
ment which he built upon what he calls the " prac- 
tical " reason. It is of its value measured from the 
logical side, or, if you please, as a purely logical 
proof that he speaks lightly of it. And in this judg- 
ment Kant was clearly right. An idea is one thing, 
objective reality another, and the mere notion of 
anything cannot of itself be accepted as a proof of 
its objective reality. The thought of food which a 
hungry man may have cannot furnish bread, nor can 
the idea of clothing provide means of protection 
from the winter's cold. Constituted as we are, we 
cannot accept notions for substances, or persuade 
ourselves that, because we possess an idea that 
that which corresponds to it exists in the outward 
world. 

And thus it stands ill with this as with the two 



46 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

former proofs offered by philosophy in favor of the 
existence of God. Logically they all fail us in 
the end. They leave ns precisely where we were 
when we took them up. If we come to them with 
the conviction that God exists, they serve to con- 
firm the conviction. But if we come as one lost in 
intellectual darkness, hoping by the logical method 
to find our way into the light, we will be disap- 
pointed. Ratiocination is at last a relatively 
superficial and unreal path to the Deity. " I will 
lay my hand upon my mouth. I have heard of 
Thee by the hearing ear, but now mine eye seeth 
Thee," said Job. But it was in the moment when 
he learned the vanity of life ; when nothing was 
left but his own soul and the Being with whom 
his trials brought him into communion. An intel- 
lect perplexed and baffied, yet with a trustful sense 
of His presence, that was the experience of Job. 

And such has always been the case with the man 
who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but 
who remains religious still. 

I promised, a short time ago, to tell you what 
Kant thought of these three arguments. I need 
hardly remind you that no philosopher before or 
since, so thoroughly, measured the powers of the 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 47 

speculative reason or so accurately set limits to its 
legitimate investigations. It is with the three ar- 
guments which we have just been considering that 
he deals in his " Critique." He affirmed that in 
the realm of speculation these three arguments 
alone were possible. But his conclusion in respect 
of them all is that they are insufficient. He con- 
tended that the reason is forced to seek somewhere 
a resting place in the regress of the conditioned — 
that if something exists it must be admitted that 
something exists necessarily, for the contingent 
exists only under the condition of another thing as 
its cause, up to a cause which does not exist con- 
tingently. Yet, for Kant, these statements carried 
with them no theological significance. One by one 
he examines the arguments on which Iyocke and 
L,eibnitz had relied, and this is his conclusion : 
" The attempt to reach the Infinite Being, whether 
by the empirical or the transcendental method, must 
prove abortive, and the reason stretches its wings 
in vain to soar beyond the world of sense by the 
mere might of speculative thought." In sum- 
marizing his conclusions, after a criticism of the 
three arguments, he says : " A Supreme Being is, 
therefore, for the speculative reason, a mere idea, 



48 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

though a faultless one, a conception which perfects 
and crowns the system of human cognitions, but the 
object of which can neither be proved nor disproved 
by the reason." Holding, as he did, that our con- 
ceptions always require a sense content to work 
with, and as the idea of God contains no such con- 
tent whatever, he could come to no conclusion 
other than the one to which he actually came. It 
is true that Kant left room in his system for what 
he called the " practical reason." " We act," says 
he, "as if there were a God ; we feel as if we were 
free ; we regard nature as if she were full of special 
design ; lay plans as if we were immortal ; and thus 
our faith that these intelligible objects exist, practi- 
cally makes amends for the inability of the specula- 
tive reason." Thus in the practical reason this 
great thinker found the proof of the being of God, 
so far as he found such proof, and ends by appeal- 
ing to the moral faculties as affording assurance for 
the Divine existence, which no effort of the specu- 
lative reason is able to effect. It matters little that 
by some Kant has been deemed inconsistent. It 
matters not that Spencer declares his " Critique " 
to be a "philosophical humbug." That work 
stands to-day as the best exhibition of the logical 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 49 

powers of the mind to deal with abstract questions, 
and the most convincing proof of the inability of 
the unassisted reason to make the being of God ob- 
jectively valid. Let us own that these arguments, 
of which Kant made so little, have not been with- 
out value. They have been helpful. But they 
have been helpful to those alone who, either con- 
sciously or unconsciously, have already accepted 
the facts which by laborious arguments they seek 
to prove. 

Who can read, for illustration, the aspiration with 
which Anselm begins his rational proof for the 
being of God without seeing that he already 
accepted by faith the very fact which by argument 
he attempts to prove ? Here is his prayer : " L,ord, 
teach me to seek Thee, for I cannot seek Thee 
unless Thou teach me, nor find Thee unless Thou 
show Thyself. May I seek Thee in longing for 
Thee and love Thee in finding." Or, again in his 
" Proslogium," " Therefore, L,ord, Thou who hast 
given understanding to faith, grant to me that so 
far as Thou knowest to be expedient I may under- 
stand that Thou art as we believe and that Thou 
art what we believe Thee to be. Our belief is this ; 
Thou art a being than whom none greater can be 
4 



50 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

conceived." Is such, a one really seeking to reach 
the goal of his search along the highway of the 
unassisted reason ? Or, is he not, on the contrary, 
seeking to find a rational basis for a belief of which 
he is already in possession? In fact, it must, I 
think, be admitted that all these so-called rational 
proofs are but attempts to account for and to 
justify a belief which already exists, and that it 
is perfectly safe to say that they have seldom, if, 
indeed, ever, carried conviction to anyone not 
already biased in their favor. Philosophy has 
found reasons for our convictions because it had 
to find them. It has vindicated faith where such 
faith has already existed. But it has never en- 
gendered it. It has furnished no proof objectively 
convincing. On the contrary, it has left man, 
weary with the toilsome journey along which it 
has led him, still gazing out into the impenetrable 
darkness, asking the same questions with which he 
began. 

Let us hear, then, the conclusion of the whole 
matter. Philosophy has nothing to tell us concern- 
ing the nature of God. In spite of its pretentious 
claims it has failed either to find Him or to satisfy 
the reason even of His existence. From such a 



THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 5 1 

source we will look in vain for an answer to our 
question, What is God ? Elsewhere, we may per- 
haps, find a competent reply to our question. 



LECTURE SECOND. 

REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 

Confessedly, then, philosophy has failed. De- 
spite of the long and weary search it has not found 
God. Long ago, Job predicted the result. Medi- 
tating beside his tent door, he ascertained for him- 
self the limits of the logical reason, and found a 
true knowledge of God to be beyond its reach. 
Speaking of such knowledge, he says : " It is high 
as heaven, what canst thou do ; deeper than hell, 
what canst thou know? The measure thereof is 
longer than the earth and broader than the sea." 

And yet Job did find God. But not along the 
highway of intellection. He learned what all men 
of his class have since learned, that to the mere 
intellectual searcher " Clouds and thick darkness 
are round about Him," and that a true knowledge 
of God is the portion of those who seek Him with 
the whole heart. 

And such was also the conclusion of Paul. 
Though living in an age long preceded by one, the 
splendor of whose intellectual achievements has 

(52) 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 53 

never been surpassed, he yet takes his stand with 
the man of Uz and affirms that " the world by wis- 
dom knew not God." It is the old story. One 
generation goeth and another cometh, and in each, 
man with unaided vision has striven to penetrate 
the darkness that hides the Almighty ; but always 
with the same result. Every purely rational at- 
tempt that has yet been made has ended in failure. 
Philosophy has left us on the top of Pisgah, with 
the desired land far in the distance, itself yielding 
to the stern decree, " Thou shalt not go over this 
Jordan." 

But why has philosophy failed ? Why, in spite 
of these long and weary years of searching, has it 
not fotmd God ? I think that in justice to phi- 
losophy we should first hear its own account of its 
failure. If the reasons presented appeal to us as 
valid, we are bound to accept them ; if not, we are 
then at liberty to go on to discover, if possible, 
such as are more satisfactory. 

You are doubtless aware that, philosophy puts 
the entire blame for its defeat on the nature of the 
task itself. It affirms that, because man is finite and 
God ^infinite, He is in the nature of the case un- 
knowable. As infinite God is ever beyond us, liv- 



54 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

ing His life in utter remoteness ; strive as we may, 
we cannot pass the boundary that marks the limit 
of our outlook. What may lie beyond the horizon 
we do not and cannot know. We may, indeed, 
speculate, guess if we choose, but so far as real 
knowledge is concerned we are shut up to the 
finite. 

Such is the apology that philosophy offers in ex- 
planation of its failure. And if it be true that our 
finiteness excludes a knowledge of the infinite, 
then we are bound to accept the apology. No one 
is to be blamed for not doing that which prima 
facie is impossible ; what cannot be known cannot 
be known, and that is the end of the matter. 

But is it actually true that man is incapable of 
divine knowledge? And are we finite, in such a 
sense as to shut us out from all possible knowledge 
of God ? It will be worth our while to look crit- 
ically into this sweeping declaration for the reason 
that, it carries with it conclusions which we are by 
no means willing to admit. In fact, a denial of the 
possibility of divine knowledge involves a denial 
of the possibility of all knowledge. Whatever 
militates against the one militates against the other. 
There is no way of dividing the world of reality 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 55 

into distinct and separate departments. Facts, do 
not stand alone and out of relation to other facts. 
The universe is a whole. Whatever may be said in 
the interest of any particular thesis, the finite and 
the infinite touch each other, and are so related as 
that each is known in the light of the other. To 
hold that a knowledge of God is impossible, for the 
reason that He is infinite, is not only to fly in the 
face of facts, but also to shut our eyes to a number 
of logical contradictions. 

For instance, it is a contradiction of terms to 
affirm that God is infinite and yet limited. To an 
infinite Being there can be no limitations save those 
that are self-imposed. Such a Being will do what- 
soever is pleasing to Himself. Around Him no 
circle can be drawn, and to Him no leashes may be 
attached. Whether in the realm of the limitless 
or in that of the limited He is alike free. A lim- 
ited infinite is unthinkable ; it involves a contra- 
diction of terms. Accordingly, the possibility of 
entering the realm of the finite, living in it, and 
even under its conditions is essential to the very 
conception of an infinite Being. Unrestrained 
power is not infinite power. It is rather its nega- 
tion. The highest form of power of which we can 



56 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

conceive is that, of a power unlimited indeed from 
without, but at the same time capable of self-limit- 
ation. Almighty will, is mightier than the mightiest 
of physical powers, for the reason that it is capable of 
self-control. Apart from this ability, power becomes 
the victim of its own resistless might and ceases to 
be infinite. The ability of self-limitation, or if you 
please, of self-control, is the sine qua non of infinite 
power. And so, for the very reason that God is 
infinite in power, He may, if it pleases Him, enter 
the realm of the finite, live under its conditions, and 
so make Himself known to man. With Abraham 
in his wanderings ; with Moses in the solitudes of 
Horeb ; with Elijah, in the lonely vale of Cherith ; 
or with Daniel on the banks of the Chebar, He may, 
if he chooses, hold fellowship. He may even take 
upon Himself a human form, may live with men, 
share with them their lot, for nothing is or can be 
impossible to a Being who is really infinite in 
power. Accordingly, if God is not known it is not 
for the reason that He is infinite. Were He less 
we might, indeed, search in vain for Him. But for 
the very reason that He is what He is, He may 
bring Himself within the realm of our knowledge. 
Indeed, it is the very limitlessness of His power 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 57 

that makes such a manifestation of Himself pos- 
sible. No, we shall have to discover some other 
reason than this of the infiniteness of God if we are 
serious in our attempt to find the reason for the 
failure of philosophy. 

Nor is it true that man is finite in such a sense as 
to shut out a knowledge of God. Your devout soul 
will testify not only that God has entered into his 
consciousness, but that he is also more certain of the 
fact than he is of most of those that enter into the 
experience of his daily life. In fact, the absolute 
certainty of our knowledge of God is the basis of 
religion and just as certainly of all morality. The 
conviction of millions of the sanest and most trust- 
worthy among men is that, they not only know God 
but that they have also communed with Him even 
as a friend communes with a friend. From this 
conviction no danger, no pain, in short, nothing 
" whether height or depth, principalities or powers, 
things present or things to come," has been able to 
separate them. To millions, the fact of such com- 
munion has been the most real experience of life ; 
to as many it has robbed death of its terrors and 
turned the martyr's flame into a halo of glory. 
To affirm that God is unknowable for the reason 



58 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

that He is infinite and we finite, is to beg the ques- 
tion and to set ourselves at variance with the most 
palpable of facts. 

Nor is this all. We remarked a moment ago 
that the denial of the knowableness of the infinite 
carried with it a denial of the possibility of all 
knowledge. Now as a matter of fact, a knowledge of 
the infinite is inseparably bound up with our knowl- 
edge of the finite. Indeed, if we have ever put to 
ourselves the question, " how do we know what we 
know ? " we have discovered that much of our knowl- 
edge of particular things is derived from what we 
call their correlatives ; that is to say, that we know 
things in the light of their opposites. We know 
the light, as light, for the reason that we are able to 
to put it over against the darkness. Except for the 
darkness we could not know the light as such. The 
same is true of heat and cold, of evil and good, of 
love and hate, of truth and falsehood. Each are 
intelligible through reference to the other, each 
throws light on its opposite and is known by 
means of its opposite. 

It is so also with the infinite and the finite. Each 
is known in the light of the other. They are correl- 
ative terms, each of which carries with it a reference 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 59 

to the other, and the idea expressed by each is intelli- 
gible only in the light of that which apparently de- 
nies it. In the words of John Caird, " In order to pro- 
nounce that we know only phenomena, we must be 
aware that there is something other than phenomena; 
we must, at least, know of the existence of things 
in themselves, realities behind phenomena from the 
knowledge of which, in the full sense of the 
word, our intelligence is debarred. If we know no 
other than finite and phenomenal existences, then 
we should never know or be able to characterize 
them as finite and phenomenal. To pronounce, in 
short, that our knowledge is in any sense limited, 
we must have access to a standard to which that 
limited knowledge is referred ; we must be aware, 
at least, of the existence of something beyond the 
limit which to our intelligence is inaccessible." 
And that is to say that, knowing the finite we 
must needs know the infinite, for the reason that a 
knowledge of the one involves a knowledge of the 
other. 

Nor has man in his search for truth at any time 
acknowledged the limits of the finite. Never yet 
has investigation, except in the interests of material- 
istic or agnostic philosophy, paused even on the 



60 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

remotest shores of the sensuous, or confessed its in- 
ability to go beyond. Indeed, the very question, 
" Can man know the infinite?" proves that he does 
know it. Otherwise the question could have no 
meaning. It cannot be answered either in the 
affirmative or the negative except on the admission 
that we are already possessed of a knowledge of 
that to which the question refers. For how, let us 
ask, is the fact to be explained that a term which, 
as we are told, carries with it no intelligible mean- 
ing, has been chosen by the mathematician, the 
poet, yea, by all who have sought to put in speech 
man's loftiest and truest thought ? Are we to sup- 
pose that intelligent beings know not that of which 
they speak ? Or are we to think that, in the mind 
when the word is spoken there is present no idea 
that corresponds with it, or that thought ceases 
when the pen writes or the lips pronounce the 
familiar word? Do not conceptions antedate 
articulate speech, and do not words stand for 
ideas already possessed? Before the word is 
spoken the idea for which it stands must needs 
have preceded, for the reason that speech is but 
the feeble and oft inadequate attempt to express 
ideas already present to the mind. Language is 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 6 1 

not first and then thought, but, contrariwise, man 
speaks what has already been in the thought. 

Astronomers tell us that the universe is limit- 
less ; that the worlds perform their revolutions in 
space to which no bounds can be set. And the 
words are not meaningless. We know what the 
limitless in space is. Beholding the far-away star, 
man asks himself the question, u What is beyond 
that?" and answers his own interrogation by say- 
ing, " The infinite in space." And thus, when on 
the wings of the morning, investigation takes its 
flight to the uttermost verge of the known uni- 
verse, it yet looks beyond, conscious not only 
that it is looking on the infinite, but also certain 
that it knows that upon which it is looking. 
The same is true in respect of the infinite in 
time. Sweeping backward, thought easily com- 
passes the brief period that we call the historic. 
Man speaks of these remote times, transports him- 
self to them, lives in his imagination in them, 
thinks of them as though they were but yesterday. 
In thought, he puts himself in touch with the 
remote past and communes with the builders of the 
pyramids. With ease he oversteps the ages as 
though they were but nothing, and brings himself 



62 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

to the time when the morning stars sang the cre- 
ative hymn. Nor does he pause even here. In his 
regress, he rests not until finding himself on the 
shore of a limitless ocean, still looking outward, 
conscious that that which he now contemplates is 
nothing other than the infinite in time. Though 
seeing in the limitless beyond no resting-place for 
his thought, he is not surprised for the reason that 
he expects none, knows that there is none. Truly, 
the soul of man circumscribeth all things. It con- 
tradicts all experiences, abolishes time and space, 
and sees in both the inverse measure of its own 
power. A man is capable of eliminating both, for 
the human spirit sports with time. It 

" Can crowd eternity into an hour 
Or stretch an hour to eternity." 

Thus the fact that man speaks of the infinite, thinks 
it, takes it into his reckoning, is proof sufficient 
that he knows it. 

Of course, in saying this, we do not mean that it 
is possible for us to form a mental picture of the 
limitless. What is indeterminate, in the nature of 
the case, transcends the limited out of which we 
construct our mental pictures. But, though inca- 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 63 

pable of representation, the infinite is not, for that 
reason, beyond our knowledge. We know things 
of which we can form no mental picture. The 
mind knows truth and lays hold of realities apart 
from their representations. It knows beauty, al- 
though it is incapable of framing for itself a mental 
picture of it. It knows truth, in spite of the fact 
that it is impossible to -represent it to the imagina- 
tion. It knows love, though it is unable to trans- 
late it into form. And so, too, though it is impos- 
sible for us to form a picture of either the limitless 
in space or time, we yet know them, because they 
are necessities of thought ; we are persuaded of 
them no less than we are persuaded of our own ex- 
istence. Face to face with the facts, we are hardly 
justified in accepting the apology offered by phi- 
losophy in extenuation of its failure. As a matter 
of fact, we do know the infinite ; we know it for the 
reason that a knowledge of the infinite is of neces- 
sity included in our knowledge of the finite. 

But we must now look a little more critically 
into the merits of the statement in which the finite- 
ness of man is so unqualifiedly affirmed. I need 
hardly remind you that it bears on its face the im- 
press of that school of thought which persistently 



64 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

refuses to see anything but the material in man. 
Now, whatever may be our estimate of this particu- 
lar school of philosophy, it will not be denied that, 
it utterly fails to give a satisfactory account of man. 
It leaves out of consideration the most significant 
fact of his constitution — I mean the fact, of his 
self-conscious personality. 

Materialism, affords but a partial view of things. 
It sees in the world nothing but matter, and mis- 
takes the tenement in which man dwells for the 
man himself. To be sure, if we are content with 
the belief that we are one with the brute, that 
our beginning as well as our ending is the dust, 
materialism may satisfy us. But the moment man 
lifts his head or becomes possessed of the belief that 
his origin has been in the heavens rather than in 
the mire, he must part company with materialism. 

Nevertheless, let us hold the materialist for a 
moment to his dictum. Let us accept as true his 
statement that a divine knowledge is beyond the 
possibility of finite beings. Let us own that to the 
finite no vision of the infinite may come, and that 
God, if known at all, is known alone by beings who 
bear His likeness and share with Him His essence. 
Let us admit all that. What, then, is to be thought 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 65 

of man in view of the fact that he does, as we have 
just seen, know the infinite ? Does not that fact 
make short work of the assumption that man is 
finite ? If a knowledge of God is possible only to 
beings whose nature is one with His own, does not 
the fact that man does possess such knowledge lift 
him out of the mire in which materialism places 
him and vindicate his right to call himself a kin of 
the Being whom he calls God ? In the light of 
the facts, the conclusion cannot be escaped. If 
you start with the premise that the infinite cannot 
be known by the finite, then the fact that man does 
know the infinite proves that he is more than 
finite. We cannot escape the conclusion, however 
at variance we may be with the philosophy. 

Nor is it true that man is finite in the sense 
in which materialism affirms that he is. He is 
more than finite and knows himself to be more. 
Of course, in saying this, we are not to be under- 
stood as affirming that he is infinite in the sense in 
which God is infinite. In the nature of the case 
there can be but one infinite Being. But while not 
infinite in the sense in which God is, it is just as 
certain that he is not finite in the sense in which 
the brute or things are finite. In his innermost 
5 



66 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

fiber man is spiritual, self-conscious and free. In 
all that really makes him man, he is the direct an- 
tithesis of the material. And it is of the very 
essence of man as a spiritual and self-conscious be- 
ing, to transcend the finite, to rise above the world 
of inner and outer experiences, seeing that neither 
would have meaning or reality if they did not rest 
on and imply a consciousness deeper than the con- 
sciousness of nature. It is this capacity of tran- 
scending the finite, this affinity to that which is 
universal and infinite, that constitutes the latent 
grandeur of man's nature and that has been the 
secret impulse to all that is great and noble in the 
individual life and in the history of the race. 

Nor does it at all vitiate this conclusion that 
man on the material side finds himself limited. 
What matters it even, if ages ago, these bodies 
were derived from animal or vegetable life through 
descent ? It is not with the tenement that we are 
concerned. It is rather with the tenant, the self- 
conscious being who inhabits the body and who for 
a time makes it his dwelling place. Nor is it a 
new discovery that the body is subject to the laws 
that govern in the realm of all things earthly. 
" Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth," is 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 67 

indeed the certain doom of the fleshly house, since 
from whence it came thither shall it return again. 
But 

" Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 
Was not written of the soul." 

The solemn terms of the commitment have no 
reference to the being who during the brief period 
of his earthly pilgrimage makes the body his home. 
To the person, the body has always been regarded 
as but a temporary dwelling-place. The real man 
knows that he but inhabits it and that he is inde- 
pendent of it. He sees it growing old and weather- 
beaten at the very moment that he knows him- 
self to be youthful in thought and love and every 
power that belongs to the true self. L,et us own 
that, for the genesis of these tabernacles, evolution 
offers a plausible theory. Nevertheless, it stands 
to-day as it has always stood in the presence of the 
human spirit, with its hand on its mouth. For the 
spirit there is no explanation possible from the ma- 
terial side. It is upon this persistent something, 
this resident of the material body, this " I " of 
which man speaks whenever he makes reference to 
his true self, upon which evolution as a universal 
formula is wrecked. It is this self, this spiritual 



68 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

being possessed of power to know and to know that 
it knows ; to feel and to know that it feels ; to will 
and to know that it wills, that is the despair of 
materialism. Yet jnst this is the real man. Noth- 
ing less, for nothing besides is essential to his be- 
ing. And this Ego, this spirit, transcends the 
finite and knows itself to be capable not only of a 
knowledge of God but also of actual communion 
with Him. 

And thus it appears that nothing either in the 
Divine nature or in our own is sufficient to bar out 
a knowledge of God. As a matter of fact we can 
and do know the infinite and are conscious that it 
sustains such relations to us as that we are com- 
pelled to find in it at once the presupposition and 
end of all finite thought and life. Once and for all, 
we must refuse to accept the apology of philosophy 
for its failure when it affirms that, since God is in- 
finite He cannot be known. That He is infinite 
no one will deny. But that He cannot on that 
account be known is a non sequitur, which, in the 
the interest of truth, we are bound to reject. 

But why, then, has philosophy failed ? I think 
that there are two reasons. 

First. Because of its refusal to deal honestly 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 69 

with the problem of the world, in that it ignores 
the differences presented by it. 

Second. Because of its rigid adherence to the 
logical method. 

L,et ns now see in how far these indictments may 
be sustained. It may, I think, be assumed, that 
when once the true ground of the world is found, 
God will also be found. So far, at least, religion 
and philosophy are in accord. To find an ultimate 
in the light of which the world may be unified, is 
to end the search. But no ultimate can be accepted 
as final which fails to unify the diverse or present 
a conception in the light of which the world may 
be regarded as a whole. A true ultimate must 
afford a rational interpretation of the facts just 
as they are, rid them of their sensible diversity 
and reduce their manifoldness to simplicity. 

Now, the discovery of such a world-ground is the 
task of philosophy. It begins with the assumption 
that the world is knowable ; in other words, that it 
is a unit. It assumes this because it must. A 
world that is knowable must in the nature of the 
case be a unit. It cannot be many. 

And yet the world does not present itself as such. 
It is not the unity of things that most impresses 



70 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

one when standing face to face with realities. On 
the contrary, it is their manifoldness, their diver- 
sity. Things are not alike either in reality or ap- 
pearance. Laws that hold in respect of a particular 
class of facts do not seem to hold in respect of an- 
other. Truths apparently contradict, and the 
aspect of the world is that of a chaos rather than 
that of a harmonious unity. Now, when these real- 
ities are classified they arrange themselves under two 
distinct categories. We speak of them as belong- 
ing either to the world of mind or of matter, to the 
world of spirit or of substance, the world of thought 
or that of sense. Both of these worlds are real ; 
with both we have to do, and by no trick of speech 
can their differences be eliminated. 

No one needs be told that the objects that pre- 
sent themselves to the eye or to the touch are real. 
They prove themselves by every test of reality. 
We believe that the world in which we live is 
an honest world ; that it does not deceive us. 
We believe that when our eyes rest on the forest, 
the distant hills, the landscape, that we behold 
realities and not phantoms, or even the projections 
of our minds. We are satisfied that the world of 
matter, at least, is real. We cannot persuade our- 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 7 1 

selves that we are living in a world of mere appear- 
ances, that we behold nothing, hear nothing, feel 
nothing. 

But the world of thought is no less real. In fact, 
we know it as we know nothing else. We know it 
better than we know those grosser forms of matter 
that we see with our eyes and handle with our 
hands. Thus there are two distinct classes of real- 
ities, or, if you please, two worlds. And what is 
more, these worlds cannot be identified. They be- 
long to two separate classes, possess different qual- 
ities, in short, have nothing in common. The 
world of matter is extended ; that of spirit is devoid 
of extension. The one is the world of freedom, 
the other that of necessity, and any theory in which 
these distinctions are ignored or their realities iden- 
tified, denies the trustworthiness of experience and 
deals unfairly with the facts. If we are to find our 
way into the light instead of the darkness we must 
deal honestly with the facts and reckon with them 
just as they are. 

Now, in the light of these considerations we are 
able to see what is essential to a true ultimate. It 
must do two things : 

First. It must take into account these distinct 



72 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

worlds of spirit and matter, of thought and of sub- 
stance, and deal with them just as they present 
themselves ; and 

Secondly. It must present a conception in the 
light of which the diverse may be eliminated and 
the world conceived as a unit. That alone can be 
a true principle of unity and at the same time a 
true world-ground which is able to meet and to 
satisfy both of these requirements. 

A little further on we shall examine the world- 
ground as presented by religion and submit it to 
both of these tests. Meanwhile, let us see in how 
far the various world-grounds proposed by philoso- 
phy have been able to meet them. Allow me once 
more to state the problem. 

Given a world made up of the diverse, to find a 
ground in which these diversities may be reconciled 
and the world conceived as a unit. 

You will grant, I am sure, the impossibility of 
our taking into account the entire range of philo- 
sophical literature. I shall accordingly select from 
its numerous systems three, in which an answer to 
our problem is attempted, and which at the same 
time represent the non-religious thought of the 
present. Let us begin with Pantheism. 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. J$ 

Its father was Benedict Spinoza. Born in the 
city of Amsterdam, in the year 1632, he yet stands 
as the best exponent of the school of thought of 
which he was the originator. Spinoza, finds the 
unifying principle of the world in the idea of 
" Substance." With Spinoza there is but one real 
thing, and this thing exists in itself. It needs 
nothing else to explain it. This is the conception 
which needs no other conception in order that it 
may be conceived. This one and universal sub- 
stance is the real ground of everything else. Mat- 
ter and mind are simply attributes of this one 
single substance and belong to its essence. 

In themseleves they have no reality and exist 
only in appearance. Matter, or extension, exists in 
modes. It may be at rest or in motion. So also 
does thought. The modes of thought are intellect 
and will. But all modes and attributes belong to 
the one substance and are but its different manifes- 
tations. They have no separate and independent 
existence. 

Thus you see how Pantheism solves the problem 
of the diverse and by what means it arrives at 
unity. It does it by denying the existence of the 
diverse. Mind is not, matter is not. There is, ac- 



74 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

cordingly, no dualism in the world that needs to be 
explained or resolved. Its dualism disappears in 
the single idea of "substance." 

It will not, I think, be denied that we have here 
a short and easy way out of our difficulty. It is 
that of denying that the difficulty exists. If you 
can persuade yourself that neither the outer nor the 
inner worlds are real, that both are but appear- 
ances, the mere shadows of something real that 
lies back of them, you will have but little diffi- 
culty in unifying the world or of finding the ulti- 
mate which thought demands. But if you believe 
that the world is an honest world, that it does not 
present shadows instead of substances, and if you 
are convinced that in so far as we know the world 
we know it as it really is, you will find it impossi- 
ble to rest in the conviction that our problem is to 
be solved by the simple process of eliminating its 
troublesome factors. It is true that Pantheism has 
its fascinations for many minds. Like all systems 
of thought which have occupied the attention of 
men, it contains its grains of truth. It serves as a 
healthy antidote to that bald Deism which would 
rule God out of His world and seat Him upon some 
icy throne far away, an indifferent spectator of the 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 75 

world which He has created, and then abandoned to 
itself. Nevertheless, there is a sin of which no sys- 
tem of thought may be found guilty if it is to com- 
mand the attention and confidence of the great 
body of thinking men, and that sin is the one of 
manipulating the facts as we know them. And 
of this Pantheism stands convicted. It does not 
leave matter and mind as distinct realities but 
makes them coalesce into the single idea of sub- 
stance, of which they are but the double shadow. 
But in doing this Pantheism violates the first prin- 
ciple of science, which requires that we leave the 
facts just as we find them. A philosophy that 
would command the confidence of men must not in 
its own interest juggle with the facts or ignore dif- 
ferences where such differences actually exist. 

And so in our search for the ground of unity we are 
compelled to part company with Pantheism. We 
must rest satisfied with no ultimate in which the 
diverse cannot be reconciled and the world as it is 
be conceived as a unit. Perhaps, when such an 
ultimate is found, we shall also find the One who is 
the first and the last, the beginning and the end- 
ing ; for it may be that, none other than He can be 
the true and final ultimate. 



J 6 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

Let us now turn our attention to Idealism. It, 
too, proposes a principle of unity. It finds its 
world-ground in " thought." It ought, perhaps, be 
said that Idealism includes all those systems of 
thought in which the separate and distinct existence 
of the material world is denied, in the interest of 
what it is pleased to call the "Idea." Rightly de- 
fined, Idealism includes all those systems in which 
the world is conceived in terms of thought, or in 
which thought is made the only true and eternal 
reality. It includes the illustrious names of 
Kant, of Berkley and of Hegel — names which stand 
as synonyms of speculative thought itself. Differ- 
ing from each other in many particulars, they all 
agree in this, that the unifying principle of the 
world is to be found in thought. 

Professor Mullins, in his thoughtful book, " Why 
is Christianity True?" thus states the essential 
tenets of Idealism as they bear upon our problem : 
" Everything which exists is thought. Thought 
and existence are identical. Matter, if we view it 
properly, is thought and nothing else. Cause and 
effect which we observe in the world of matter are 
really a mental ideal which we bring to matter our- 
selves. Space, which we see all about us, is also a 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. J J 

way of regarding matter which the mind creates. 
As you might gather fruit and drop it into a bag, 
so the mind gathers the facts of the external world 
and drops them into the conception of space. 
Space is the envelope which the mind slips over all 
objects around it. This is true, also, of all other 
forms of thought about material things. Thus, 
with all our strivings, we never get at anything 
except ideas or thought." 

" These ideas, however, are not merely our own 
ideas confined within the limits of our own minds. 
The world about us is not to be confounded with 
the world within us. The world about us is too 
evident and too actual for us to rest in this conclu- 
sion, says Idealism. The world actually exists out- 
side of us. If, then, there is nothing in the world 
but thought, and if the world is not merely our 
thought about it but something more, what is it ? 
The answer which Idealism gives is, that the ex- 
ternal world represents for us the thoughts of God. 
Indeed, Idealism asserts that the world is ' the great 
thinker ' in the act of thinking His thoughts, and 
we are thinkers who think His thoughts after Him. 
. . . Beginning thus with an idea, nothing is found 
in the world about us nor in the world above us, 



78 THE NATURE OE GOD. 

but the one Being whose chief characteristic is 
ideas. All the development of the world, then, is 
but the development of God's thought. There is 
an evolution going on, but it is simply the evolution 
of thought." 

Thus you see how Idealism disposes of the prob- 
lem presented in the world's diversity, and by what 
method it arrives at unity. It disposes of the divers- 
ity in the world just as Pantheism does, by denying 
that it exists. It identifies matter and mind, exist- 
ence and thought, and leaves us but a single reality, 
of which all things are but the projection. 

But by what right does Idealism thus dispose of 
the material world, the reality of which is attested 
by every sense faculty? By what right does it 
close its eyes to the entire realm of reality, and 
persist in seeing but one hemisphere of the real ? 
Is such a method of dealing with facts in all con- 
science to be spoken of as honest ? It is little won- 
der that Idealism has never been more than the 
creed of a particular sect. Shutting its eyes to the 
real world of sense impressions, or what we call the 
facts of nature, its conclusions are at once vitiated. 
It is the whole world, and not a segment of it, that 
is to be reckoned with, and no principle of unity 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 79 

can possibly be the true one which does not take 
into account the whole circle of facts just as they 
present themselves, and at the same time furnish a 
conception in the light of which they may be uni- 
fied. If, therefore, we really know what we know, 
we are compelled to reject the ultimate which Ideal- 
ism presents. If we really know anything, we know 
both the world of matter about us and the world of 
mind within. If our knowledge is real knowledge, 
we know that they are different and that they can- 
not be identified. Dualism, is a truth which no in- 
tellectual process has yet been able to overcome. 
To force a solution, by assuming some unifying 
principle regardless of consequences, is not a pro- 
ceeding which seems to be desirable and which is 
certain to lead to many evil results. 

But I must hasten to speak of yet another ulti- 
mate, presented by the now current philosophy as 
a solution of our problem. It is the one offered by 
Materialism. Materialism finds the unifying prin- 
ciple of the world in the " atom." By this atom 
the worlds were created and all that in them is. 
Here in the crystal or in the grass blade ; there in 
the animal or man. Here building mountains or 
continents, or there in the systems that shine in the 



80 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

darkness, this something, which eye hath not seen 
nor ear heard has been at work fashioning the uni- 
verse of being. Toiling through ages, unguided 
and without purpose, it has at length produced a 
world the wisdom of which has been alike the won- 
der of the scientist and the philosopher. Just what 
this " atom " may be we are not told. Even its 
existence and nature belong to that great realm of 
existences the grounds of which, as Professor Hux- 
ley tells us, " rest upon the great act of faith." This 
alone we know, that the atom is matter, since in the 
world there is nothing besides. 

But how about that other world, the existence of 
which is just as certain, and even better known by 
us than this world of matter? How about this 
world of mind and thought and spiritual realities? 
The answer is, " This also is matter. Thought is 
but a secretion of the brain." In the words of a 
modern materialist, " All those capacities which are 
comprehended under the name of the ' soul's activi- 
ties,' are only functions of the brain substance." Or 
to express it more coarsely, " Thought stands in the 
same relation to the brain as the gall stands to the 
liver." Accordingly, there is no world of mind or 
thought or spirit. As separate realities they disap. 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 8 1 

pear. But one thing is left, and that is matter. 
I shall not occupy your time in considering the 
enormous inconsistencies of Materialism or the 
havoc, which if practically applied, it would make of 
all that is most sacred to us in life. That must not 
now concern us. Our question is this ; does Mate- 
rialism furnish a true principle of unity ? Does it 
look the world in the face, reckon with its two great 
realities, and show us a way in which they may be 
reconciled ? If it does not, then the atom is not and 
cannot be a true ultimate. You will recall that 
long ago Spinoza laid down this axiom : " Things 
which have nothing in common cannot be under- 
stood by means of one another ; the conception of 
one does not involve the conception of the other." 
In view of this allow me to ask — have matter and 
mind anything in common ? Are they not essen- 
tially distinct? Is not one of the distinguishing 
attributes of matter extension and that of mind in- 
extension? Is not mind free, and is not matter 
clearly within the realm of necessity ? Prima facie, 
the world is a dualism. We can make nothing else 
out of it. What God hath not joined together, it 
is not within the power of thought to unite. We 
have either to fly in the face of facts, or reject the 
6 



82 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

ultimate presented by Materialism. From our prob- 
lem we must not eliminate any of its essential fact- 
ors if we are to arrive at a true result. Mind is. 
Matter is. Both are real. Both are to be taken 
into account, and no ultimate can possibly be ac- 
cepted as true, which fails to recognize their sep- 
arate existence at the moment that it binds them 
together into a harmonious unity. 

Well, had we the time we might go on to exam- 
ine other and less pretentious systems ; but the re- 
sult would be the same. All alike deal unfairly 
with the facts. In the interest of some particular 
principle of unity they all deny the diversity, and 
accordingly all end in failure. We will never arrive 
at a correct solution of any problem by the short- 
cut method of eliminating its troublesome factors. 
Every factor must be taken into account and its 
help sought, if we are to arrive at truth. They all 
are but way-marks that need to be consulted if we 
are unwilling to wander forever in the mazes of 
uncertainty. " Every would-be universal formula," 
says Professor James, " every system of philosophy 
which rears its head, receives the inevitable critical 
volley from one-half of mankind and falls to the 
rear to become at the very best the creed of a partial 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 83 

sect. Either it has dropped out of its net some of 
our impressions of sense — what we call the facts of 
nature — or it has left the theoretic and denning 
department with a lot of inconsistencies and unme- 
diated transactions on its hands ; or else finally, it 
has left some one or more of our fundamental active 
and emotional powers, with no object outside of 
themselves, to react on or to live for. Any one of 
these defects is fatal to success. Someone will be 
sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system and to 
seek another in its stead." 

But a second reason for the failure of philosophy 
is to be found in its rigid adherence to the logical 
method. It proceeds upon the assumption that if 
God exists, His existence must be capable of logical 
demonstration. It must be logically deduced, just 
as one would deduce a proposition in Euclid from 
self-evident axioms. 

Now, it might as well be admitted once and for 
all, that the existence of God cannot be demon- 
strated. Proofs there are in plenty, but they are not 
such as may rightly be called objectively valid. 
What is above logic and outside its legitimate realm 
cannot be demonstrated by logic. Every question 
must be determined by the sort of evidence corre- 



84 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

sponding to its nature, and we have no right to de- 
mand some other sort. In the realm of the ab- 
stract, logic may help us ; but in that of the con- 
crete, it is of but little, if any, value. In all these 
matters logic is compelled to wait on experience for 
its premises, and experience stands in its own right. 
And God is not an abstraction. He exists, if He 
exists at all, in the realm of the concrete and the 
actual. But in this realm we can deduce nothing 
logically. We believe in our own existence and in 
that of the world, although neither can be logically 
demonstrated. Life abounds in practical certainties 
for which no logical reason can be given, but which 
are nevertheless the foundation of our daily life. 
Our practical trust in the uniformity of nature, in 
one another, in the affection of friends, in the senses, 
is not the result of a logical process of thought. 
Numberless logical objections might be raised which 
would reduce all these to probability ; still we are 
convinced of them. In fact, the beliefs which we 
hold with the deepest conviction are not the cer- 
tainties of logic, but the certainties of life. Dem- 
onstration, in the nature of the case, is confined to the 
realm of the subjective and logical relation of ideas, 
and can never attach to reality. It cannot be applied 
to either the facts of science or to those of religion. 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 85 

And so, when philosophy attempts by logical 
deduction to establish the existence of God it un- 
dertakes an impossible task. It has back of it no 
self-evident axioms upon which it can rest, and 
accordingly builds its structure in the air. No, 
the existence of God cannot be deduced by logic. 
It is the necessary postulate of every argument 
rather than the logical conclusion of one. It is a 
truth, which like most of the truths of which we 
are convinced, depends not upon demonstration 
but exists in its own right. 

Moreover, the discovery of that principle of 
unity which, as we have already seen, is essential 
to any true world-ground, is absolutely beyond 
the power of logic. Logic does not banish 
contradictions. It does not reconcile differences. 
On the contrary, it but intensifies them where 
they exist. Permit me once more to quote 
from John Caird : " We speedily find that the 
unity of the spiritual world is a thing which lies 
beyond the scope of formal logic, and that instead 
of reconciling, our rational efforts only bring into 
harsher opposition and discordancy the differences 
we seek to solve. Nor from the nature of the 
thing can it be otherwise. If the sphere of spir- 



86 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

itual reality be that in which nothing exists as a 
self -identical entity, how is it possible that formal 
logic, whose fundamental principle is the law of 
identity, should be other than baffled in the en- 
deavor to grasp them? Or how can an organ of 
thought which tests all things by the so-called 
law of contradictions, compass, or in the attempt 
to compass, do anything else than misrepresent 
the realities of a world where analysis is ever 
revealing oppositions which, if taken abstractly, 
are contradictions and whose absolute opposition 
can only vanish in the light of a higher synthe- 
sis ? The only source of the rationalizing intellect 
in order to attain self-consistency is to explain 
away or sacrifice one side or aspect of truth to an- 
other with which it seems to conflict, or to select 
some supposed fundamental principle or dogma as 
its starting point, and force everything else in the 
many-sided world of thought into external coher- 
ence with it. The only method, in other words, 
which logical ratiocination has for attaining unity is 
that of abstraction and generalization ; that which 
proceeds by the elimination or excision rather than 
by harmonizing differences." 

I shall offer no comment on the intellectual dis- 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 87 

honesty of such a procedure as this. It but con- 
firms the statement made at the beginning, that 
philosophy does not deal fairly with the problem of 
the diverse, that it does not look the world squarely 
in the face and deal with it just as it is. Little 
wonder is it that it has failed to find God, for God 
is not the goal of the pathway along which philoso- 
phy chooses to travel. 

But is there, then, no ultimate capable of bind- 
ing together the diverse elements of the world and 
of satisfying all those requirements which thought 
demands in a true world-ground ? I think there is. 
I believe that when fairly considered just such an 
ultimate is presented in the Christian idea of a per- 
sonal God. At any rate, it will be worth our while 
to submit it to the various tests of a true ultimate, 
and if it proves itself capable of meeting them we 
are justified in affirming it as final. 

There are three requirements which the mind 
makes of any would-be ultimate. 

First. It must afford a rational explanation of 
the world as it is. 

Second. It must present a principle of unity in 
the light of which the diverse may be reconciled. 

Third. It must satisfy the needs of every de- 



88 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

partment of our personality by presenting an object 
upon which each may react and for which it may 
live. 

Let us now apply these three tests to the Chris- 
tian idea of God in order that we may see whether 
it is able to meet them. 

First, then, does this idea afford a rational ex- 
planation of the world? Whether true or false, 
any view of the world which completely satisfies 
the mind must conform to the conditions which 
the mind itself imposes. The mind must be its 
own umpire to decide whether the world is fit to 
be called rational or not. That it so accepts it is 
proven by the fact that it believes itself able to in- 
terpret it and regards it as an object of knowledge. 
But a world that can be known is, ipso facto, 
rational. If it can be known it is for the reason 
than it is a " cosmos " and not a chaos. And as 
such man has universally regarded it. Face to face 
with its realities he has always believed himself in 
the presence of that which may be interpreted. 
Men universally believe that there is such a thing 
as real science, that the world is an honest world, 
and that our knowledge of it is not a delusion. It 
matters little whether this conviction be true or 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 89 

false ; it is here, it is universal and verified by 
every test. Accordingly the mind refuses to accept 
anything as a world-ground that treats its convic- 
tion with disrespect. Believing the world to be 
rational, it demands a rational world-ground and 
refuses to accept any other. 

Well, then, does the idea of a personal God af- 
ford a rational explanation of the world ? Does it 
account for that intelligence which the scientist 
seeks to discover, and which at last is the essence 
of his science ? I think that to ask this question is 
also to answer it. For, confessedly, no ultimate 
other than the one presented in a personal and self- 
conscious Being is capable of meeting the test. 
Every other fails, and fails utterly. Mere Will 
alone, mere Mind alone, cannot meet the require- 
ment. Schopenhauer's " Pure Will " or Hartman's 
" Impersonal Will and Idea " do not meet the case. 
Pure will is nothing. Reason itself, is a pure ab- 
straction. Subtract from reason or will or idea the 
element of personality and nothing is left. Pure 
will, unconscious intelligence, impersonal reason, 
impersonal spirit, are all empty phrases. They need 
the self-conscious spirit to give them meaning and 
reality. They are at best but functions of the per- 



90 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

sonal self that stands back of them. All are 
actualized in a personal being alone. It is the 
person who thinks, the person who wills, the person 
who reasons. So far, then, as the first test is con- 
cerned, the Christian idea of a personal God meets 
it. It affords the only rational explanation of a 
rational world, and among all the ultimates which 
have yet been presented it is the only one that does. 
But the second demand that thought makes of a 
true ultimate is that it present a conception in the 
light of which the world may be unified. Now, to 
our senses, the world presents itself as a dualism. 
Realities exist under two forms, and arrange them- 
selves into two distinct classes — those of matter and 
those of mind, those of spirit and those of sub- 
stance. And yet, if our knowledge of the world 
as a whole be real, and if the world be as we be- 
lieve it to be, a cosmos, then it cannot be many, it 
must be one. However it may present itself, a 
world which can be known must be at bottom a 
unit. But if it be in reality what thought affirms 
it as being, then the explanation of its unity is to 
be found in its ultimate. Plainly it can be found 
nowhere else, for in no other light than in that of 
its ground can the unity of the world be affirmed. 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 9 1 

We have already seen that, as yet, philosophy has 
presented no ultimate equal to the task of unifying 
the world. In the interest of a particular principle 
of unity, one or the other of the diverse elements 
has been left out of consideration. Idealism elim- 
inates the real world outside of us, and materialism 
does the same for the inner world of ideas. But 
no one-sided interpretation of the facts is admissi- 
ble. No troublesome factor may be ignored. There 
must be no juggling with the facts. Matter is, mind 
is, and no ultimate is worthy of the name which is 
incapable of mediating between the two and of 
presenting a conception in the light of which the 
unity of the world may be confirmed. 

But how fares it with the Christian idea of a 
personal Being in the face of this severe and crit- 
ical test ? Does it present that bond of unity which 
thought requires in a true world-ground ? I think 
we have but to apply it in order to find that it 
stands alone in the field as a mediator. It has no 
rival. Indeed, we may affirm with L,otze that " it 
is the unity of the diverse in our own self-conscious 
personality that suggests the unity of the world." 
In fact, the only unity that is or that can be, is the 
unity effected in or by the self-conscious person. 



92 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

Take, for instance, your own self-conscious per- 
sonality. You are aware that it is made up of 
many elements and manifestations. You are at 
least a trinity. There is your rational, your voli- 
tional and your emotional nature. You cannot 
fail to recognize these distinctions in yourself. At 
different moments, indeed, at the same moment, 
you live and have your being in each. And yet, in 
spite of these distinctions, you recognize that you 
are one single person. You speak of yourself in 
the exercise of these distinct functions and say, 
I think, I feel, I will. Will, intellect, feeling, are 
bound together in unity in the self-conscious per- 
son. You live in altogether different experiences ; 
experiences of joy and of sorrow, of childhood and 
manhood. But you are aware that you are the one 
single person who rejoices or suffers, who was young 
and now old. Sixty years ago, when you were yet 
a child, there was made, let us say, a photographic 
image of what you were then. Twenty years later, 
when manhood was reached, the same was repeated. 
Though many changes have taken place, you still 
recognize in the picture of the man some of the 
features of the child. Yesterday, after the lapse of 
thirty more years, you repeated the experience. 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 93 

Again you are different. A stranger cannot now 
identify the man of sixty with the child of three score 
years ago. Yet those three pictures are the images of 
one and the same person. The first is that of the 
beautiful and careless child, the second that of the 
mature man, the third the man of gray hairs and 
ripened experience. Yet you speak of the child, 
of the man, and of the one now in his full maturity, 
and say, "They are myself." You identify the 
three, although in appearance they are diverse and 
say the}' are one. But what makes the identifica- 
tion possible ? Is it not the fact that in self-con- 
sciousness the unity is effected, and is it not the 
personality that spans the years and unites in itself 
the diverse ? It is the self that abides throughout 
the years, and it is in this same self that the one- 
ness of the three is established. And so, too, in 
the self-conscious person the two distinct realities 
of the world of matter and that of mind are unified. 
As self-conscious persons we are at home alike in 
the world of material things and in the world of 
thought. In us both worlds are united. We 
live in the body, suffer its pains, experience its 
hunger, feel the weight of its years. We speak of 
bodily suffering, and say, " I suffer " ; of bodily 



94 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

hunger, and say, "I hunger," and of the years 
whose increase write their record alone on the 
physical structure, and say, "I am growing old." 
But we live also in the realm of thought and spirit 
lost to the material world and finding in the spir- 
itual world our native element. As personal beings 
we touch both worlds and unite them in the unity 
of our self-consciousness. 

And thus in the self-conscious personality we 
find an ultimate entirely capable of satisfying the 
second test, in that it presents the principle of unity 
required in a true world-ground. In fact, person- 
ality stands alone in the field. It alone is capable 
of binding together the outer and the inner, the 
world of matter and the world of spirit. Beside 
it there is no other mediating principle. 

But there is yet one other requirement which 
must be met in any ultimate which may be accepted 
and rested in as final. It must satisfy the demands 
of our volitional and emotional, as well as those of 
our rational nature. In other words, it must not 
leave any of our fundamental powers without an 
object outside of themselves on which to react and 
for which to live. It is not enough to warrant our 
acceptance of any proposed ultimate that it satisfies 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 95 

the logical side of our nature alone. After all, the 
logical expresses but one side of our complex being. 
We are emotional and volitional as well as rational. 
All of these departments of our nature must have 
a vote in the matter, and no ultimate will pass 
muster which violates any of their essential modes 
of activity or which leaves them without a chance 
to work. From the emotional and active there 
come demands which must be taken into account 
and reckoned with. The integrity of our entire 
personality in each and all of its essential elements 
must be preserved at all hazards, and no one of our 
essential powers may be left to perish through 
atrophy. And this is the reason why every ulti- 
mate that has yet been offered by philosophy has 
been rejected. They have each and all appealed 
to the logical department of our nature and have 
forgotten that man is more than a reasoning being. 
One and all, they have presented a deaf ear to the 
cry that comes from the emotional and active side 
of our nature and forgotten that it is not to be 
hushed by the offer of a stone instead of bread. 
But does the Christian idea of a personal God 
as the ground of the world meet this requirement 
also? Does it present an object outside of our- 



96 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

selves on which our whole being may react ? Does 
it make provision for every department of our 
nature and leave no one of our essential powers to 
sicken and die for want of exercise ? Replying to 
this question in the light of experience it may con- 
fidently be affirmed that no ultimate other than this 
has had vitality enough to awaken or to keep alive 
all of our essential powers. Every other has left 
the will without a motive to act and the heart 
without an object to love. 

But where has the need of the whole self been 
so completely answered as in the Christian idea of 
a personal God ? What has so stimulated thought 
or summoned it to such splendid achievements? 
What conception has so fired the emotions or given 
such an impulse to noble activity ? It alone satis- 
fies the demands of man's reason. It alone presents 
an object that he can love without being degraded 
and live for without being debased. 

And thus it appears that all the requirements 
which thought insists shall be met in a true world- 
ground are met and satisfied in the Christian idea of 
a personal God. It affords the only possible expla- 
nation of a rational world. It alone unifies its diverse 
realities and satisfies the needs of all the essential 



REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 97 

elements that enter into the constitution of our 
complex being. But if God be a person, we have 
in that fact a sufficient answer to our question — 
Why has philosophy not found Him ? For if He 
be a person, then it is not within the province of 
philosophy to find Him. Ratiocination is not a 
pathway that leads to a knowledge of a personal 
being. Into the realm of the personal, mutuality 
alone can open the door. The hunger of the soul 
rather than the craving of the intellect is the pri- 
mary requisite to the finding of the One who Him- 
self has declared : "Ye shall seek me and find me 
when ye shall search for me with all your heart." 
7 



LECTURE THIRD. 

RELIGION. 

We must now bid adieu to philosophy. Our brief 
review of its methods and results has sufficed to con- 
vince us of its inability to deal with our question — 
What is God? Yet, we must not suppose that 
philosophy is of no value to religion. Within its 
legitimate sphere it may be of the greatest service. 
It may help us to sift the wheat from the chaff and 
afford a valuable aid to the work of clarifying our 
conceptions of a Supernatural Being that have 
been otherwise derived. If religion has, as we 
shall presently see, its basis in experience, then the 
business of philosophy is that of sifting the facts, 
of verifying them, of separating them from the 
accidental, of developing their organic unity, of 
showing their connection with other elements of 
our knowledge ; in short, of giving them that form 
which systematic knowledge must at last assume. 
So long as it confines itself to the facts given in 
the religious consciousness, examines them in the 
light of necessary postulates of thought, it may be 

(98) 



REUGION. 99 

of immense service. But the moment it goes be- 
yond this, its legitimate sphere, it becomes a usurper, 
and, though masquerading under the garb of friend- 
ship, is certain to prove itself the subtle and un- 
compromising foe of religion. 

Religion stands in its own right ; and the rela- 
tion that philosophy sustains to it is that of serv- 
ant. Whenever this relation is reversed, philosophy 
is sure to substitute its abstract conceptions of God 
for those of religion, and to debase the eternal 
thou into a metaphysical IT, which it offers for 
our worship and seeks to make respectable by vest- 
ing it with dictionary titles which have no meaning 
to the religious soul. 

11 Philosophy baptized 
In the pure fountain of eternal love 
Has eyes indeed ; and viewing all she sees 
As meant to indicate a God to men, 
Gives Him the praise and forfeits not her own. ' ' 

Apart from such baptism, philosophy in the field 
of religion is a blind guide, which, if implicitly 
followed, is certain to land its votary in the ditch. 

Now, the vital distinction between philosophy 
and religion is this. In philosophy, the mind is 
yet intent on its search for the Infinite ; God is yet 



IOO THE NATURE OF GOD. 

in the remote distance, the Being yet to be discov- 
ered. In religion the search is ended, the goal has 
been reached and the soul finds itself in possession 
of God. Permit me here to quote a sentence from 
Caird : 

" Whether we view religion from the human side 
or from the divine ; as the surrender of the soul to 
God, or as the life of God in the soul ; in either 
aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has 
ceased to be a far-away vision, and has become a 
reality. The very first pulsations of the spiritual 
life, when rightly apprehended, is the indication 
that the division between the spirit and its object 
has vanished ; that the ideal has become the real, 
the finite reached its goal and become suffused in 
the life of the Infinite." Now, if this claim can be 
vindicated ; if it can be made out that religion has 
not only found God, but that it also holds actual 
and familiar fellowship with Him, then clearly it 
has something to tell us of the nature of the One 
with whom it holds such intimate relations. For 
the reason that religion is what it is, it is in the 
nature of the case the final authority on all ques- 
tions pertaining to the nature of the Being who is 
back of all. 



RELIGION. IOI 

But, what is religion ? What do we mean when 
we speak of a specific attitude of the spirit or of a 
particular class of experiences as religious ? What 
is that particular quality or characteristic that 
attaches to this particular class of facts, and which 
does not attach to others ? For, if we are able thus 
to isolate a certain kind of facts, it must be for the 
reason that something attaches to them that does 
not attach to others, by means of which we are 
able to classify and distinguish them as such. Just 
what this characteristic is, is of the most vital im- 
portance. If we are to make any headway in our 
study of religious facts, we must first be able to 
distinguish them from others, and determine what 
it is that gives them a right to be classified as such. 
In other words, we must have some criterion to 
which facts must be referred, and to which they 
must conform, before we accept them as distinct- 
ively religious. As in science a correct comparison 
and classification of facts depends on their reference 
to some principle, so also in religion. 

But what is this principle or criterion ? Clearly 
it must be something that carries us beyond the 
accidental ; beyond mere outward resemblances and 
differences. Apart from such a principle we are 



102 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

certain to be misled and to fall into the mistake of 
identifying religion with that which only resem- 
bles it. Perhaps we may best determine what this 
criterion is by satisfying ourselves as to what it is 
not. 

For one thing, our principle is not to be found in 
mere forms of worship or in anything that is out- 
ward and accidental. And outward worship is a 
mere accident of religion. For when we come to 
look into its history we find that no particular form 
of worship is essential to its life. Worship is but 
one of the forms in which religion finds expression. 
But it is capable of existence apart from formal wor- 
ship. It has lived in dens and caves, where no out- 
ward suggestion of sanctity has served to lift the 
thoughts upward, as well as in gorgeous cathedrals 
in which the genius of man has given to wood and 
marble the power of speech. It has lived and flour- 
ished alike, in the silence of earth's waste places and 
in splendid temples resounding with the melody of 
organ and chanting choir. It is utterly indifferent 
to the outward. It needs no anthem or ritual or 
priest to give it vitality. On the contrary, when- 
ever the formal and the outward have been relied 
upon or unduly emphasized, religion in all that 



RELIGION. 103 

makes it what it really is has sickened and died. 
But just as little is the principle that we are seek- 
ing to be found in knowledge. Yet that is by no 
means the same as saying that knowledge is not 
important. It is. For religion does not consist of 
the stuff of which dreams are made. It does not 
shut itself up to the realm of mere emotions or live 
its life in the privacy of our subjective experiences 
alone. On the contrary, religion is intelligent. It 
rests solidly on realities rationally apprehended. In 
fact, were not man a thinking being he could not be 
religious. It is his ability to think and to rightly 
interpret his experiences that makes him a religious 
being. The moment that religion parts company 
with knowledge it cuts itself loose from reality, 
degenerates into mere caprice and waywardness, 
and ceases to be religion. But the knowledge that 
is vital is not of necessity the kind that takes the 
form of pure thought, or ideas or doctrines scien- 
tifically apprehended and developed into reasoned 
systems. Were this the case the learned alone would 
be religious, and we would search in vain for piety 
among the lowly. And religion sways all alike, 
whether learned or ignorant. It lives its life alike 
in the soul of a Newton or a peasant. It enriches 



104 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

and floods with supernatural light the fields of 
reasoned truth and imparts its comfort and strength 
to the ignorant and oppressed pauper who toils for 
his daily bread. Knowledge is, indeed, important, 
but it is the kind of knowledge of which all alike 
are capable ; the kind that enters into ordinary 
thinking and that expresses itself in the language 
of common life. 

Nor does the idea of religion reside in creed or 
dogma. It is independent of both. Both are acci- 
dental and secondary. Both are after products. As 
the plant precedes the science of botany, and the 
facts of history antedate their record on the printed 
page, so does religion precede both dogma and 
creed. Both are but attempts to put into form 
the facts of which religion knows itself to be pos- 
sessed. Religion is the reality of which creed and 
doctrine are but the verbal expression. 

But while relegating these to a secondary place, 
we must not lose sight of their importance and real 
service. In fact, both are necessary to the propa- 
gation as well as the purifying of religion itself. 
Except as religion takes form in doctrine it ceases 
to be rational. What cannot be expressed in speech 
is vet in the realm of fane v. It is the formal ex- 



RELIGION. IO5 

pression of its content in creed and dogma that re- 
deems religion from the vagaries of privacy and 
individual idiosyncrasies. Were it to live its life 
shut up to our inner experiences it could never 
know itself and would be certain to degenerate 
into the unrealities of mysticism. In order that 
it may become knowledge, its subjective experi- 
ences must needs be translated into doctrine, for 
the reason that it is in doctrine that what is in the 
inner life is represented to the intellect, examined, 
clarified, and put into rational form. Yet neither 
creed nor dogma are to be identified with religion. 
Religion is the reality ; doctrine its more or less 
correct expression. 

But just as religion needs thus to be repre- 
sented in doctrine in order that it may become 
intelligent, so also does it need to be framed into 
creed, in order that it may become a living power 
in the world. A creedless religion can never 
become more than the private possession of the 
individual. It can never conquer the world or per- 
suade men of its reality. For, after all, as Sohm 
has indicated, " a creed is not as some think, a 
series of dry formulas in which is summed up the 
results of abstract thinking on divine things. It is 



106 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

rather a record of divine realities which have hith- 
erto sustained the life of the religious community, 
which through past centuries and even now repre- 
sent the source of power and ruling strength of re- 
ligion against all hostile influences and contain the 
principles of continual regeneration of the world. 
In fact, it is in the creed that the religious com- 
munity is made to recognize its oneness and power. 
It is the truths of religion, thrown into the form of 
a creed and lifted up as a standard, that has made it 
an objective power well nigh as mighty in the outer 
world as are the truths thus witnessed and confessed 
over the individual life." But while all this is true, 
it must not be forgotten that the creed is one thing 
and religion quite another. The creed is the ex- 
pression ; religion the reality. 

And so we shall look in vain for the principle 
after which we are seeking in either creed or dogma. 
Neither are of the essence of religion, for the reason 
that it has its existence apart from both. Its ultimate 
source and secret is to be found neither in philo- 
sophic intelligence nor in anything belonging to 
the outward, but in the feeling of self-abnegation, 
of conscious dependence, of reverence, aspiration, 
in that disposition or attitude towards God, call it 



REUGION. 107 

what you will, that gives moral elevation to the 
humblest intelligence and sheds spiritual grandeur 
around the homeliest and obscurest life. 

But it may be asked, By what right is the field 
containing the principle that we are seeking thus 
circumscribed, and by what authority are we thus 
shut up to the realm of the inner life ? I answer, 
by virtue of the right that belongs to the expert in 
any field of knowledge to determine its proper 
limits and to give a definition of his own particular 
science. Manifestly the right to define must, in all 
justice, be accorded to the specialist in any partic- 
ular department of knowledge. If we are in ear- 
nest and really desire a right apprehension of any- 
thing, we will insist that the one who assumes to 
define it shall himself be acquainted with the facts 
of which he undertakes to speak. Of what possi- 
ble value would a definition, say of biology, coined 
by one whose knowledge is confined to mathemat- 
ics, of architecture, be to anyone ? Or what has 
anyone whose mind is occupied solely with the 
task of hewing wood or carrying mortar to tell us 
of the principles of art or music ? What we require 
in a definition is that it be a description of some- 
thing given by one who knows. Least of all is the 



108 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

one who has a particular thesis to defend to be con- 
sidered. What right has a Spencer, or a Mill, or 
any of their ilk, who cannot even find God in His 
universe and to whom the Eternal is but a shadowy 
specter of which, at best, but uncertain glimpses 
may be had — what right have such to speak of 
those relations which exist between the soul and 
the Being with whom it has, and knows that it 
has, fellowship ? Let the shoemaker stick to his 
last. What we want is expert testimony. I claim no 
right that is not gladly accorded to the votary of any 
particular branch of knowledge when I insist that 
those who know, those whose knowledge and ex- 
perience fits them to testify, shall be heard in an- 
swer to our question, What is religion ? And no 
one knows enough of any branch of knowledge to 
entitle his definition to respect until he himself has 
stood within its sanctuary and opened his own 
mind to every possible avenue through which such 
specific knowledge may come. It is not true that 
your outsider, your cold critic, knows the most of 
things. Clear, impartial insight requires, not that 
we have no preferences, but that we have right 
preferences. To say, as some do, that religious 
people cannot judge about religion is like saying 



RELIGION. IO9 

that the humane cannot understand suffering or 
that genius cannot understand painting, that for 
true art you must avoid consulting with Raphael, 
and in music you must keep clear of Beethoven. 
The same applies to religion. We must insist on 
hearing the testimony of the expert alone. No de- 
partment of knowledge has suffered half as much 
as the religious through false definitions volun- 
teered by the vulgar and the uninitiated. And 
what is, if possible, still worse, her so-called de- 
fenders have too often brought it into contempt by 
a hasty adoption of these definitions, which as little 
define religion as a description of a beetle would 
accord with that of a human being. Religion 
knows itself and is known by all who open them- 
selves to it. It is under no obligations whatever to 
house and make respectable every waif which those 
who seek only to bring it into contempt may choose 
to lay at its door. Accordingly, in answer to 
our question, What is religion ? we shall hear the 
reply of such alone who know. Nor should we 
confine ourselves to the votaries of any particular 
school, even of religious thought. We should hear 
representatives from each and accept as essential 
that particular element upon which all are agreed. 



IIO THE NATURE OF GOD. 

You will grant, I am sure, that it would be diffi- 
cult to find a better representative of what may be 
called a modified intellectualism in religion than 
Principal Caird, of the University of Glasgow. In 
the introduction to his " Philosophy of Religion," 
this great preacher and philosopher thus defines it : 
" Religion is the surrender of the finite will to the 
Infinite. Oneness of mind and will with the Di- 
vine mind and will is not the future hope and aim 
of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the 
soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate 
the struggle between my false self and that higher 
self which is at once mine and infinitely more than 
mine ; it is to realize the latter as that with which 
my whole spiritual being is identified, so that it is 
no longer ' I ' that lives, nor any * I ' that I can 
claim as my own — but ' God liveth in me.' " 

Over and over again does Caird remind us that 
religion is that elevation of the human spirit 
into union with the Divine. That it is " oneness 
with God " ; that it is " the life of God in the soul " 
or the life of the soul in God ; that its very 
essence is the living consciousness of personal com- 
munion with God. 

Differing in many of his theological conceptions, 



RELIGION. Ill 

yet one with Caird in his definition of religion, 
stands Wilhelm Herrman, of the University of Mar- 
burg. I shall quote a few sentences from his book 
entitled, " Faith and Morals." Speaking of the ex- 
periences of the religious soul when living faith 
first begins, he says, u Whatever he may have heard 
before about God in other ways, he will now know 
for the first time that he has found God himself. 
For now he not only cherishes thoughts about God 
which others have handed down to him, or which 
he himself has excogitated ; he lives in the midst 
of experiences in which he traces God working 
upon him. A man can only say that he has found 
God when it has become clear from some event in 
his life that God has therein sought him out and 
touched him. This is the regular order of all liv- 
ing piety in all religion." 

But it is in that greatest of all his productions 
entitled " Communion with God," that Herrman 
sets forth most clearly his idea of religion. It was 
of this remarkable book that a distinguished Amer- 
ican teacher of theology, upon being asked by a 
theological student what books he should provide 
for the study of doctrinal theology, replied, " I 
would recommend, first of all, Herrman's c Com- 



112 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

munion with God.' " When asked what else, the 
professor thought for a moment, and finally said, 
" I do not know as you will need anything else." 
Well, if you have read this book you have found 
that his idea of religion is expressed in its signifi- 
cant title, " Communion with God." For, with 
Herrman as with Caird, religion is nothing else 
than the personal and conscious communion of the 
soul with God, which is mediated through Jesus. 

Otto Pfleiderer is, as you know, Professor of The- 
ology in the University of Berlin. Among thinkers 
of the liberal school, he is regarded as, perhaps, the 
leading theologian of the present. I shall quote 
but a single, yet quite remarkable, passage in which 
he states what he regards as the " heart of religion." 
It is evident, says he, " that Jesus, according to the 
first three Gospels, called God His Father in no 
sense other than the one in which He taught us 
to pray ' Our Father in heaven ' ; and in which He 
said of the merciful and the peacemakers that they 
should be called ' children of the Father in heaven,' 
who makes His sun to shine on the evil and the 
good." In exactly the same sense Paul says, " Ye 
are the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." 
And he therefore calls Christ the "first born among 



RELIGION. 113 

many brethren." Hence, it is evident that we must 
consider the divine Sonship which formed the funda- 
mental character of the religious self-consciousness 
of Jesus, not a unique metaphysical relation be- 
tween Him and God, but as the first actual and 
typical realization of that religious relation in gen- 
eral in which men should stand to God because of 
their divine origin and destination, and which be- 
comes a real experience in all who believe in Christ, 
that is, make their own his filial spirit." We may, 
therefore, consider the consciousness of divine Son- 
ship ; this salient feature in the personality of Jesus, 
at the same time the characteristic essence of the 
Christian religion ; its distinguishing mark from all 
that is pre-Christian and extra-Christian and the 
nucleus of all specifically Christian utterances con- 
cerning God, man and the world." You see, then, 
that with Pfleiderer the consciousness of sonship 
with God is the vital thing in religion. 

You will, I am sure, pardon me for introducing 
yet another authority. For I am anxious that we 
shall hear the testimony of representatives of every 
school of religious thought at all worthy of the 
name. For, in our search for the essential in re- 
ligion, we must not confine ourselves to the repre- 



114 TH E NATURE OK GOD. 

sentatives of either conservatism or liberalism in 
theology. 

Romanticism has also a right to be heard. In- 
deed, no testimony bearing on the question would 
be complete without that of the great mystic, 
Fredrick Schleiermacher. According to Schleier- 
macher, religion is the " immediate consciousness 
of all that is finite as existing in and through the 
infinite ; of all that is temporal, as existing through 
the Eternal. It is to feel, amid all becoming and 
change, all action and suffering, that life is life only 
as it is lived in and through God. The sum total 
of all religion is to feel that in its highest unity all 
that moves us in feeling is one ; to feel that aught 
single and particular is only possible by means of 
this unity ; to feel, that is to say, that our being and 
living is being and living in God. The true nature 
of religion is immediate consciousness of the Deity 
as He is found in ourselves and in the world." 

It is true that Schleiermacher placed undue em- 
phasis on feeling. But if you bear in mind the 
audience to which he spoke, and remember that it 
was made up of the Rationalists of the eighteenth 
century, you will see how natural it was that he 
should put special emphasis on the factor that was 



RELIGION. 115 

most neglected and which in his judgment could 
best bring men into that immediate relation to the 
Highest in which religion lives and has its being. 

Well, nothing would be easier than the task of 
multiplying this testimony from the literature of 
religion. From Augustine, with soul athirst for 
God, to Austin Phelps, who refused to revise the 
" Still Hour " for the reason that he recognized in 
it the work of " another mind dwelling in him," 
the whole line of experts who have penetrated into 
the depths of that soul experience in which religion 
lives, confirms the testimony already given. Though 
differing as they often do, as to the extent and defi- 
niteness of the knowledge that is necessary, they 
all agree as to what constitutes its real essence and 
unite in their testimony, that its very heart is the 

LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS OF ONENESS WITH GOD, and 

that in such intimate and mutual fellowship it finds 
its life and being. 

But it is in the literature of the Hebrews that 
religion finds its best and noblest expression. Con- 
templative in his constitution, tending as he did to 
the mystical, the Hebrew found in religion his na- 
tive element. It cannot be doubted that the pleas- 
ures of the world, the lust of wealth, the absorption 



Il6 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

in material things which goes with a commercial 
age, such as that in which we are now living, leave 
a barren soil to all that is religious. The seers of 
the Infinite have usually been the quiet and con- 
templative souls. For the most part they have 
been those whose chief delight has been to feel 
themselves alone with God. They have been those 
who have felt themselves to be strangers and pil- 
grims in the world and who have regarded its gains 
as unworthy of serious effort. 

And then, too, the simple habits, the fervid tem- 
perament, the peculiar sensitiveness of the affec- 
tions and imagination engendered by a rural life, 
the perpetual sight of the everlasting hills that by 
day, and of the sky that by night, spoke their mes- 
sages to a soul unoccupied with other things ; all 
contributed to the ability of the Hebrew to produce 
the highest and the best in the realm of religious 
literature. 

Turn, if you please, to that book in which the 
religious emotions of the Hebrew find their best 
expression — I mean the Psalms. Hear the longing 
of David's heart for God, whom he loved and with 
whom he delights to commune, as it is voiced in 
the forty-second Psalm, "As the hart panteth for 



RELIGION. 117 

the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, 
O God. My soul thirsteth for the living God." 
Hear it again in the sixty-third : " O God, thou 
art my God ; early will I seek Thee. My soul 
thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee in a 
dry and thirsty land where no water is ; to see Thy 
power and Thy glory so as I have not seen Thee in 
the sanctuary. Because Thy loving kindness is 
better than life, my lips shall praise Thee." Or 
mark his devotion even to the house inhabited by 
Jehovah : " How lovely are Thy dwellings, O Jeho- 
vah of Hosts : my soul longeth, yea, even fainteth 
for the courts of Jehovah. My heart and my flesh 
cry aloud for the living God. Yea, the sparrow 
hath found for herself a house, and the swallow a 
nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even 
thine altars, O Jehovah of Hosts, my King and my 
God." Or that in the one hundred and thirtieth 
Psalm, " My soul looketh for the Lord more than 
the watchmen look for the morning ; yea, more than 
the watchmen look for the morning." 

It is unnecessary to cite other and just as specific 
passages. For when rightly regarded the Psalter 
emphasizes but a single thought. Taken as a 
whole, it but expresses the intimate yet varying 



Il8 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

relations that exist between trie soul and the Being 
whom it trusts ; to whom it looks for guidance ; 
whose hand it sees in history, whose absence it 
mourns and in whose confidence and fellowship it 
finds its chief joy. And the fact that communion 
with God is the essence of religion, is proved by 
the fact that in these very Psalms the religious ex- 
perience, whether that of the Hebrew or that of the 
devout soul of to-day, finds its best and noblest 
expression. 

It is a far-away cry from David and Asaph, to 
Paul and John the beloved. Yet the same thought 
characterizes the religious conceptions of all. What 
words could better express the relation that the 
devout soul sustains to God than the Apostle's 
prayer for the saints at Ephesus, to whom he dedi- 
cates one of his epistles ? Here is the prayer : 
" That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ; 
that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be 
able to comprehend with all saints what is the 
breadth and length and height, and to know the 
love of Christ which passeth knowledge ; that ye 
may be filled with all the fullness of God." Or, 
what more truly expresses the substance of this 
experience than the utterance of John, when he 



RELIGION. 119 

tells us that "every one that loveth is born of 
God and knoweth God " ? Or, that " God is love, 
and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and 
God in him"? 

And thus it matters not whether it expresses it- 
self in the Song of Songs, whether in the devotional 
hymns of David, or whether in the more studied 
and unimaginative utterances of an Augustine, a 
Herrman or a Caird ; religion is ever the same — the 
abiding consciousness of oneness with God ; the inti- 
mate and immediate fellowship of the soul with the 
Highest. To the religious soul God is not a stran- 
ger. On the contrary, He is the best known of all 
realities, for the reason that He affects more pro- 
foundly than anything else the spiritual conscious- 
ness. Of His existence and nature the religious 
soul is persuaded as it is of nothing else. Indeed, it 
is the certainty and the immediate nature of its 
knowledge that keeps religion alive, for a God un- 
known, who produces no effect in the consciousness 
or whose presence makes no part of our experience, 
cannot be an object of love or call into being those 
confidential relations in which religion finds its 
exercise. 

Now, it would be strange if religion had not its 



120 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

counterfeits. It has them in plenty. Varieties of phe- 
nomena, on account of some outward resemblance, 
have often been mistaken for and as often classified 
as religious. Nevertheless there is and can be but 
one religion. Outward appearances, however simi- 
lar, do not prove the identity of things. The 
manufactured flower, for instance, may readily be 
mistaken for the real if attention is confined to the 
appearance alone. But the likeness is only in the 
outward. The aroma, the delicate color of leaf 
and flower, the life that inhabits the true are en- 
tirely wanting in the copy. In a word, the one 
is alive, the other is dead. It is in the innermost 
of things that we must find their real likeness or 
difference. Yet, deceived by outward resemblances, 
a variety of phenomena, ranging from the coarse 
fetichism of the savage to the intellectual abstrac- 
tions of philosophers, have been classified as re- 
ligious. 

Is it any wonder, when identity is found in mere 
appearances rather than in the innermost nature of 
things, that we have what its votaries are pleased to 
call " the Science of Comparative Religions " ? Or? 
is it a matter of surprise, when the accidental is 
thus mistaken for the essential, that laborious at- 



RELIGION. 121 

tempts are made to trace a gradual progress from 
what are assumed to be its primitive forms, on up 
to the highest, including even the Christian, which 
alone is able to vindicate its right to the name ? It 
is a mistake. Even Buddhism, in spite of all that 
has been said for it, is not a religion but a philoso- 
phy. You cannot have a religion without a God, 
and Buddhism is godless. It is not even a moral 
system. Binding men, as it does, with the iron 
chain of metempsychosis, it cuts the very nerve of 
morality even. In fact, these various forms of re- 
ligion, of which we hear so much, have no exist- 
ence outside of the mind that has a thesis to defend. 
Accordingly a comparison of one religion with 
another is out of the question. You might as well 
speak of comparative truth or comparative reality. 
And truth is not evolved out of falsehood, or reality 
out of that which has no existence. In the nature 
of the case there can be but one religion. It may be 
simulated, but in all that makes it real it stands 
alone and above all possible comparison. It is not 
the summit to which the devout have come along 
the tedious pathway of gradual ascent. Religion is 
a spiritual birth. It descends upon man and over- 
powers him. It has no earthly antecedents. No 



122 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

trail lies behind it by means of which it may be 
traced downward and backward to an earthly and 
temporal origin. 

Of course, it is not disputed that there is progress 
in religion. There is and must be, for the reason 
that it is a living thing. Nor is it denied that it 
approaches nearer to the ideal in some than in 
others ; or that even in the same individual it de- 
velops into greater and greater perfection. This 
must needs be for the reason that it is alive. But 
the progress is always within the sphere of religion 
itself. It is never from without or from below up- 
ward. It is not the vain attempt by endless addi- 
tions or increments to become possessed of infinite 
wealth, but it is the endeavor by the constant exer- 
cise of spiritual activity to appropriate the infinite 
inheritance of which we are already in possession. 
The whole future of the religious life is given in its 
beginning, but it is given implicitly, as a principle 
which has yet to unfold its hidden riches and its all- 
subduing power. If we accept the definition 
already given that in its essence religion is oneness 
with God, that its very fiber is the consciousness of 
immediate fellowship with Him, then it is evident 
that there can be but one religion. A conscious- 



RELIGION. 123 

ness of spiritual oneness with a fetich, or an object 
that one's own hands have fashioned, is not possible 
in the case of an intelligent being. Fellowship 
between a self-conscious person and an unconscious 
object of nature is out of the question. Such fellow- 
ship demands another self. It demands a personal 
being apart from us to bring it into being. Even 
those abstract conceptions in which philosophy finds 
its God will not suffice. They all lack the very 
element that makes religion possible — I mean the 
OTHER SELF. From all such ideas there has been 
evaporated the essential element of religion, and 
nothing is left but a soulless abstraction that can- 
not be loved and with which communion cannot 
be had. For religion, a self-conscious Being, a 
Being capable of making response and with whom 
mutual commerce may be had is absolutely essen- 
tial. Look at it as we will, a Being able to make 
answer to the soul's upper quest is the sine qua non 
of religion. Another self, yet a mightier than self, 
is as essential to its life as is the light to the flower 
or self-consciouness to the person. 

But there is yet another characteristic mark of 
religion. It is that of prayer. It is through this 
exercise that religion utters itself into reality and 



124 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

becomes an active power in the world. As through 
the medium of speech actual commerce is carried 
on between human beings, so also between man and 
God. And this mutual intercourse is prayer. With- 
out prayer religion does not exist. August Sabatier, 
the brilliant and liberal French theologian, thus 
speaks of prayer : " Religion is an intercourse ; a 
conscious and voluntary relation entered into by a 
soul in distress, with the mysterious power upon 
which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its 
fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is 
realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act ; that 
is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that dis- 
tinguishes the religious phenomenon from such 
other neighboring phenomena as purely moral or 
aesthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be 
not the vital act by which it draws its life. This 
act is prayer, by which term we mean no vain ex- 
ercise of words ; no mere repetition of certain sacred 
formulae, but the very movement of the soul itself, 
putting itself in personal relation of contact with 
the mysterious power of which it feels the presence — 
it may be even before it has a name by which to call 
it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there 
is no religion ; wherever, on the other hand, this 



RELIGION. 125 

prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence 
of forms or of doctrine, we have living religion. 
One sees from this why natural religion, so called, 
is not properly religion. It cuts man off from 
prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remote- 
ness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dia- 
logue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no 
return of man to God. At bottom this pretended 
religion is only philosophy. Born at epochs of 
rationalism, of critical investigation, it never was 
anything but an abstraction ; an artificial and dead 
creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the 
characteristics proper to religion. 

But that is not all. While it is true, that 
prayer is one of the marks by which religion is 
to be differentiated from all that simulates it, 
and that in its essence it is actual and mutual 
commerce between the soul and God, yet this is 
not all that is to be said of this act of devotion. 
It is in prayer that religion translates itself into 
reality, and proves its right to be classed among 
the factors of our objective experience. For prayer 
does not exhaust itself when it breathes its sweet 
calm over the inner life. It has not spent itself 
when it has inspired hope in the despondent or dis- 



126 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

persed the clouds that brood over the spirit. It is 
through prayer that religion affects the outer world, 
accomplishes actual work in it and classifies itself 
with those actual forces of which account must be 
taken. 

And how shall I speak of what prayer has 
wrought in this real, objective world of ours ? How 
shall I tell of how it has joined hands with those 
agencies that have made for the world's betterment 
and proven itself to be not simply a weak adjunct, 
but the mightiest of them all ? For who can tell 
of all that prayer has wrought ? It has changed 
the course of empires. It made Cromwell's Iron- 
sides invincible in the day of battle. Single-handed 
it has built orphanages, hospitals and institutions 
without number. It has launched ships on the high 
seas, and made them bearers of light and hope to the 
benighted. It has opened the stubborn purse-strings 
of the miser, and compelled him to yield up his 
gold at the call of humanity. It has subdued king- 
doms, wrought righteousness, stopped the mouth of 
lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the 
edge of the sword ; out of weakness it has made 
men strong, and caused them to wax valiant in fight. 

It is not dealing fairly with the facts to say that 



RELIGION. 127 

religion is entirely subjective, shut up to the inner 
life of the soul. True, it does live in the inner- 
most, and is primarily a matter of private experi- 
ence. But it does not exhaust itself there. Just 
because prayer is a necessary accompaniment of re- 
ligion, or in the words of Sabatier, " is religion 
itself in action " it affects the world of outward 
realities and accomplishes things that are real. It 
is just this certainty that furnishes the motive of 
all prayer, and it is the firm conviction of its effi- 
cacy confirmed by multiplied proofs that keeps it 
alive. Break down the conviction of its efficacy 
and you cut the very nerve of prayer. 

But what is it that makes prayer a power in the 
world as distinct, as real and as rational as the 
power of gravity, or of light, or of electricity? 
And why is it that pious souls have used it as trust- 
ingly, and with as positive results, as men have 
used either of these ? Is it not for the reason that 
God is personal ; a Being who can be influenced ? 
Is it not for the reason that He not only hears, but 
that, as free He is able also to answer the prayer of 
all who ask in confidence and in filial resignation 
to His will ? At bottom, it is the certainty of the 
divine personality that gives life to prayer, and it 



128 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

is the fact of its efficacy that proves the personality 
of the One to whom all prayer is addressed. Intel- 
ligent beings know that help cometh not out of the 
ground ; but, on the contrary, from an all-powerful 
Being who knows our necessities before we ask, for 
the reason that He himself is both self-conscious 
and personal. 

But here we are confronted by the question, Is 
prayer, then, real prayer, confined to the limits of 
Theism? And are w T e to infer that those alone 
who think of God as personal, actually pray? If 
that be the case, what is the meaning of those tem- 
ples ; those shrines at which a blind devotion offers 
its incense to impersonal gods of wood and stone ? 
Do not these addresses, these genuflections that 
make up the ritual of heathenism, vitiate the posi- 
tion that a personal being, one who is able to hear 
and to enter into sympathy, is essential to the exer- 
cise of true prayer ? I think the question is en- 
tirely pertinent and calls for a candid answer. For 
if it can be made out that this communion that we 
call prayer may actually be had with an unconscious 
object, or even with an impersonal force of nature, 
then is our position that the idea of a personal God 
is essential vitiated, and prayer itself becomes either 



RELIGION. 129 

a meaningless monologue or an utter absurdity. 
And yet the difficulty suggested by the question is 
by no means as great as would at first appear. In 
fact, the question itself is based upon a mere assump- 
tion. It assumes that, apart from a belief in a per- 
sonal God, men do actually pray, a position utterly 
incapable of proof. For we must not be misled 
by outward appearances or superficial likenesses. 
In our classification we must hold fast to the prin- 
ciple that identity is to be found only in essentials, 
and not in that that is accidental, and which, with- 
out destroying the thing itself, may readily be dis- 
pensed with. And will anyone, not altogether a 
stranger to the real nature of prayer, hold for a 
moment, that posture or mere attitude of the body, 
or, indeed, anything that is merely outward, is at 
all vital ? Is not all this accidental ; and is it not 
true that given the soul conscious of its needs, and 
the other self able to hear and to answer, you 
have all that is essential. Prayer needs not even 
to be audibly uttered. Many a prayer, like that of 
Hannah's in the temple, has been spoken in silence 
and heard by Him who heareth in secret. Every- 
thing that is external may be subtracted, and all 
that is vital to prayer yet left. 
9 



130 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

Well, then, if actual communion alone is essen- 
tial ; if all else is secondary, then it is certain that 
heathenism as such affords no instance of true 
prayer. I say heathenism as such. For I do not 
lose sight of the fact that even among pagans, 
men who have been really in earnest to know the 
truth, have shaken themselves loose from false be- 
liefs and worship, in the midst of which they have 
found themselves, and caught visions of the true 
and only God who has not left Himself without 
witness to any of His creatures. Such an one was 
Abraham, whom God called out of Ur of the 
Chaldeans. Such, probably, were the Magi who 
came from the East to worship at the manger at 
Bethlehem. Such, doubtless, was Socrates, con- 
demned and murdered by the men of his age, for 
the reason that he ridiculed the gods of pagan 
Athens. Such was Job, the Arabian emir, who 
wrestled with God, as did Jacob, and strove to know 
the shrouded name, and hoped to find that it was 
Love. Naaman, the Syrian ; Rahab, the harlot, 
the Syrophenician woman by her sick daughter's 
bedside — all these followed the light that "light- 
eth every man that cometh into the world," and 
were doubtless among the company of which Jesus 



RELIGION. 131 

spoke when He said, " Many shall come from the 
east and from the west, and shall sit down with 
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of 
heaven." Yet it must not be forgotten that these 
are exceptions. Not one among all these was the 
legitimate product of heathenism. One and all, they 
were the " heretics " of their age ; the repudiators 
of the thought and life among which they lived. 
And we are speaking of heathenism as such ; of 
heathenism with its lords many and its Gods many ; 
of heathenism with its impersonal deities. 

You will recall that so good an authority as Max 
Muller describes Fetichism as " a superstitious ven- 
eration of rubbish." And that he also affirms that 
"it is not even a primitive form of religion." Ac- 
cordingly, it is prayerless. For how could a fetich, 
a thing cherished only as a means of gratifying de- 
sires or averting dangers and calamities, and on 
which, when disappointed men vent their irritation 
by blows and expressions of impotent anger, or by ex- 
changing it for some other equally arbitrary object, 
in any sense of the word be an object of religious 
reverence ? And why ? Is it not for the reason 
that it lacks the personal element ; that it fails to 
present the Other Self, without whom communion 
is impossible ? 



132 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

And what is true of Fetichism is true of all 
heathen religions. Personality is the pivot around 
which religion revolves. Religious thought is car- 
ried on in terms of personality, this being in the 
world of religion the one fundamental fact as much 
to-day as in any previous age. 

Well, then, if you agree that personality is the 
pivot around which religion revolves, you will ex- 
perience no surprise at the statement, that heathen- 
ism as such is prayerless. It could not possibly be 
otherwise. For, what soil does the Pantheism of the 
pagan, or the philosophical conceptions of the Hindu, 
in which personality is an illusion, and man's true 
destiny his extinction or reabsorption into the in- 
finite impersonal, afford for that communion which, 
apart from a conception of God as personal, is, 
prima facie, impossible? 

Moreover, one has but to turn to the so-called 
sacred literature of heathenism to find convincing 
proof of this fact. You will search in vain for any 
expression of that personal intercourse with the 
Deity which is of the essence of real prayer. Egypt- 
ologists tell us that in the Book of the Dead we 
have the oldest poem in the world. It is a hymn 
addressed to the rising and setting sun, and has 



RELIGION. 133 

often been cited as an expression of true piety. 
But is it, in reality, such ? Read it through, and 
you will be convinced that it is but an address to 
nature. In the Vedas, the sacred poems of our 
Indo-European kindred, you have also a number of 
hymns, which we are told approach the high plane 
of true prayer. I shall quote what seems to me 
the most devout of these passages. Addressing 
himself to Indra, the poet thus cries out : 

" He has settled the ancient mountains by his 
might ; he has directed downward the action of the 
waters. He has supported the earth, the universal 
nurse. By his skill he has propt up the earth from 
falling. 

" Dawn on us with thy prosperity, O Usha, daugh- 
ter of the sky ! O, luminous and bountiful god- 
dess ! Ushas advances, arousing footed creatures 
and making the birds to fly aloft. The flying birds 
no longer rest after thy dawning. In thee, when 
thou dawnest, O lively goddess, is the life and 
breath of all creatures." 

Now, would anyone hold for a moment that in 
either of these passages there is even the faintest ap- 
proach to real prayer ? Gems are they of the poetic 
imagination ; but you will search in vain for that 



134 TH 3 NATURE OF GOD. 

element which we have found to be of the essence 
of true communion. They are all one with Byron's 
" Apostrophe to the Ocean," and with Shelley's 
" Alastor." Compare these apostrophes, these glow- 
ing addresses to impersonal nature, with the fami- 
liar address of Elijah to God, and see the difference. 
Observe how confidently the great prophet speaks 
to the One with whom he stands upon terms of 
familiar intimacy. Observe how he lays before 
God the situation, confident that all will be under- 
stood. How he talks with Him, as a friend talks 
with a friend, of the mutual interests that hinge on 
the tests that are about to be made. How he re- 
minds God of His past faithfulness to Abraham, to 
Isaac and to Jacob. " Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, 
and of Israel ! let it be known this day, that Thou 
art God in Israel, and that I am Thy servant, 
and that I have done all these things at Thy 
word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me ; that this 
people may know that Thou art the Lord God, 
and that Thou hast turned their heart back 
again." 

Or what shall we say of that prayer in which, 
more than any other, religion has found appropriate 
utterance — I mean the prayer in which the rela- 



RELIGION. 135 

tions between the suppliant and God are conceived 
in terms of earthly fatherhood and sonship. Will 
anyone at all alive to those spiritual relations to 
which this prayer gives expression, hold for a 
moment that there is not a difference wide as the 
poles between these utterances of the truly religious 
soul and those glowing addresses to natural objects 
that make up the sacred literature of the Kast? 
The one never rises above the level of apostrophe ; 
the other is real prayer. And between the two 
there is no likeness whatever. But wherein do 
they differ ? Is it not in the fact that in the one we 
have but the expression of those mystic emotions 
which natural objects are certain to awaken in all 
sensitive souls ; while, in the other, we have the 
expression of a consciousness of spiritual affinity 
and of mutual understanding ? And that is to say, 
that in the one, God is conceived as personal ; a 
Being with whom fellowship may be had and in 
whom confidence may be reposed. While, in the 
other, the object addressed is but a mysterious yet 
awful something, hidden behind phenomena, and 
to which no other name can be given than that of 
the Unknown It. 

And never did true prayer ascend to the unknow- 



136 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

able. The cry of the soul in the moment of true 
devotion is, 

1 ' Let me gaze, not on some far-reaching 
Nor star-sprent sky ; 
But on a. face, in which mine own beseeching 
May read reply." 

Apart from the vision of a Divine face, ever smiling 
upon the kneeling spirit, there is no prayer ; for its 
source is not reverence, but a longing of the heart 
for personal and mutual fellowship with God. 

And thus, as a result of our study of prayer, we 
are forced back upon our former position, that the 
essence of religion is just this relation of the per- 
sonal spirit to a personal God. Nothing else can 
be made out of it. Every duty, every exercise, all 
that nearly or remotely enters into it involves and 
demands this personal relation. Forgiveness in- 
volves personal relations. Conscience has no mean- 
ing except as a personal God gives it authority. 
The sense of responsibility is a sense of obligation 
to a person. Prayer is made possible because there 
is a personal Being who understands and who makes 
answer. The sense of Sonship that lies at the 
heart of the religious consciousness grows out of 
personal relations. In a word, the fact of the Divine 



RELIGION. 137 

personality made known in the consciousness, and 
confirmed by daily communion, this is the pillar 
upon which religion rests. 

Well, now, before we turn away, let us see at 
what conclusions we have come. For one thing, 
we have learned that our knowledge of God rests 
upon precisely the same basis as does our other 
knowledge. It is derived through actual contact 
with its object, and has as its basis facts actually 
given in consciousness. 

Nor does the fact of its privacy detract from its 
validity. All knowledge, for that matter, is pri- 
vate. It is either your knowledge or mine or some 
other person's. The validity of any particular kind 
of knowledge is not to be determined in the light 
of its privacy, but rather in the light of the answer 
that may be given to the question as to whether it 
may be the possession of all who conform to its 
conditions. And the door of any particular form 
of knowledge has its own key. Its bolts cannot 
be rudely forced, nor will any key that we may 
choose turn them backward in their bearings. 

And this is particularly true in respect of our 
knowledge of persons. Logic here will not help 
us. The boasted scientific method may open 



138 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

the chambers of nature, but not those of the human 
soul. Approach a personal being along any avenue, 
save that of mutual sympathy, and he will resist 
the intrusion, shut himself up, and guard his inner- 
most secrets as jealously as does the Sphinx the 
secrets of the Nile. To rightly know a person, it 
is imperative that we be in attune with him. 

Well, then, if God is a person, as religion affirms, 
our knowledge of Him will come through fellow- 
ship with Him. Not through schools, but through 
life ; not through information, but acquaintance. 
And then, too, our characters must be in attune 
with His. Long ago, standing on the mount 
of the Beatitudes, that One who, among all the 
sons of men knew most of God, said : " Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
And experience has borne witness to the truth- 
fulness of that utterance. From the wise and 
prudent He has ever hidden Himself. To the in- 
different, to the intellectual boaster and self-suffi- 
cient, whether of wisdom or material achievement, 
He will always remain the " Unknown." Let phi- 
losophy boast of its achievements in the fields of 
logic and mere intellection. Let science boast of 
what it has wrought in the realm of material 



RELIGION. 139 

things. The boast of religion is in God, and in 
that knowledge of Him which is its alone. 

But, just because it is what it is, religion will 
live. Its history, through twenty centuries, has con- 
firmed the prophecy of its founder, that " The gates 
of hell should not prevail against it." Arraying 
itself against every carnal power, it has awakened 
the enmity of the world. Against it there have 
been launched those weapons of imperial power, of 
carnal hate and intellectual ridicule against which 
no earthly thing has ever stood. Yet religion has 
lived. No weapon that has been formed against it 
has prospered. And why ? Is it not for the reason 
that it is not carnal, and that it is what it professes 
itself to be, the life of God in the soul ? No other 
account can possibly be given of its persistent vital- 
ity. Having its roots in the unseen, it is also eter- 
nal, " for the things that are seen are temporal, but 
the things that are unseen are eternal." Not until 
the soul of man is quenched, not until God ceases 
to be God, will religion cease on the earth, or lose 
its power among men. 



LECTURE FOURTH. 

THE ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 

Religion, then, is a reality. It has its existence 
in the world, and is accordingly to be classified with 
those facts of our experience of which a rational 
account must be given. It is not a phenomenon 
of any particular age or mental condition. Wher- 
ever man has lived, it has lived. Indeed, so coin- 
cident is its existence with that of the race as to 
justify the statement that man is by nature a reli- 
gious being. 

But how came religion to be, and to what are we 
to trace its origin in the world ? You will, I think, 
concede that, before we are prepared to give a true 
account of the origin of anything, we must first 
have a correct notion of the thing itself. We are 
not living in a world of chance. Things have their 
logical antecedents. There is always a thread, dif- 
ficult though it may be to trace, which connects 
things with their origin, and the end of anything 
is implicitly given in its beginning. Accordingly, 

in our search for the origin of any particular thing 

(140) 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 141 

we must first have a right conception of the thing 
itself. Without this to begin with, we are like the 
traveler in an unknown country, journeying he 
knows not whither, and seeking he knows not 
what. For this reason we might dismiss the vari- 
ous accounts which philosophy gives of the origin 
of religion. One and all, they are wide of the 
mark, in that religion itself is misconceived. Nev- 
ertheless it will be necessary for us to consider two 
of these accounts, for the reason that at present, 
they are widely accepted. 

The first is the one presented by Rationalism. 
You are aware that Rationalism seeks to eliminate 
the supernatural from human history and experi- 
ence. It finds no place for the miraculous, and 
denies the possibility of a personal revelation of God 
to men. But since religion presupposes the thought 
of God, and since the thought came not through 
personal revelation, whence, then, came it? The 
answer of the rationalist is, It is inborn. We come 
into the world with certain definite and fundamen- 
tal conceptions. Our best ideas and ideals are 
innate, or the mind is so constituted as that it 
must work them out conformably to nature. It is 
true that these ideas have been sadly defaced ; they 



142 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

are not what they once were. Yet for all that, 
down at the bottom of the simple and unperverted 
heart, they yet slumber in all their primitive 
beauty. Among these innate ideas is the idea of 
God. To be a human being is to be possessed of 
the idea. It is inborn ; it has not been suggested 
by anything without, but is, on the contrary, natu- 
ral to man. 

Now, if this were true, we might easily dispense 
with a supernatural revelation. To come to a 
knowledge of God, man needs but to give himself 
to reflection, and to put into scientific form the idea 
already present in the mind. But, unfortunately 
for the theory, we do not come into the world with 
any such innate ideas. In fact, the doctrine of 
innate ideas has been abandoned by most, if not by 
all, unprejudiced thinkers. It is as much a scien- 
tific figment as is the notion of innate rights. Be- 
sides, religion needs more than an idea of God to 
bring it into being. It demands a living and per- 
sonal God ; a being possessed of actual existence 
outside of us, and who, for that reason, is able to 
affect the spiritual consciousness. A simple idea 
of God is not God. 

But when the doctrine of innate ideas was 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 43 

yielded, and along with it the figment of an inborn 
notion of God, another attempt was made to answer 
the question. It was now held that the idea of 
God follows of necessity from the nature of the 
mind. The mind carries with it the idea of infin- 
ity. And since it is not itself infinite, it must 
necessarily assume an infinite outside of itself. 
Looking outward on the universe of suns and 
moons and stars slumbering in the infinite depths, 
the mind finds in them the symbol of the infinite, 
and comes of necessity to the conclusion of an 
infinite being whom it names God. Thus the idea 
of God follows from the constitution of the mind 
itself. Reflecting on itself and the universe about 
us, it arrives of necessity at the notion of God. 
Well, as a theory this, too, is beautiful enough, but 
it also fails to give a rational account of the origin 
of that particular conception of God which is essen- 
tial to religion. Let us own that somehow man has 
come into possession of a conception of the infinite : 
we need yet to be shown how he comes into pos- 
session of the idea of God. The infinite and God 
are not the same. They are not opposite terms of 
the same equation. The infinite is a logical con- 
ception, but God is a personal Being. It is easy 



144 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

enough to understand how that those who thought 
of God should apply to Him the idea of infinity ; 
but the opposite — how the abstract idea of infinity 
could be construed into the living God — is unintel- 
ligible. The infinite in itself is not a living, per- 
sonal being, and out of an abstract conception of 
the infinite religion could not have come. Its 
origin is not to be traced to any merely intellectual 
notion, however perfect. What religion needs to 
bring it into being is not an idea of the infinite, 
but, on the contrary, the experience of God as a 
living power and actual content of the soul. The 
moment it is made to depend solely on the objective, 
whether it takes the form of creeds or institutions 
or ideas, and this subjective element is eliminated, 
religion dies. It requires a real content on which 
to live ; and such a content is not presented in 
mere ideas or notions, however exalted. 

But in the times in which we are now living 
another theory of the origin of religion has found 
favor. I mean the theory of Development. The 
triumphal march of Evolution has recently been 
transferred from the sphere of natural sciences into 
that of history and religion. Indeed, it is no longer 
regarded as a theory. To such an extent has it 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 45 

become the governing principle of thought, as that 
into its mold everything which is to pass current 
must now be cast. To be intellectually respectable 
we must now see development everywhere. Accord- 
ing to this theory, religion as we know it is the 
outcome of a long process of development. Begin- 
ning with the Fetish, the idea of God in the course 
of many generations past into the Elohistic stage, 
then into that represented by Jehovah of the He- 
brews, and finally into the refined form in which it 
is to-day presented in Christianity. 

Now, whatever we may think of the theory of evo- 
lution as applied to the material world, it is certain 
that it cannot be applied to things spiritual. And 
religion is in its very essence spiritual. It lives in a 
realm apart from the operation of physical laws that 
hold in the realm of material things. It belongs to 
the kingdom which " cometh not with observation," 
and of which Jesus declared, it is "within you." 
Moreover, it ought not to be forgotten that evolu- 
tion, even as a modal theory, is now and has always 
been discredited by many who have undisputed 
right to pass judgment on its merits. It rests upon 
an assumption which the actual history of the 
world does not seem to warrant. It assumes that 



146 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

the march of humanity has been steadily upward, 
and that progress has been the law holding in 
human history. Now, it may be that progress has 
been the law of the world ; but it is just as likely 
that it has not. At any rate, we have no right, in 
view of the facts as we know them, to take it for 
granted or to draw important conclusions from it. 
It does not minister to our confidence in the law of 
universal progress to know that every race looks 
backward rather than forward to its "golden age." 
Yet precisely this is the case. Greece looks back- 
ward to her Solon, her Thales, her Pericles, her 
Socrates, and her Plato. Egypt looks backward to 
her Pharaohs, and, pointing to her splendid ruins, 
says, " Behold what we once were ! " Rome looks 
backward to her Virgil, her Horace, and her Cicero. 
The Hebrew points to David and a Solomon, re- 
calls the splendid civilization w T hich then was, and 
mourns a glory which has long since departed. 
And to-day the wandering son of the old Hittite 
pauses in astonishment before the records of his 
own past, unable to read the writings of his fathers, 
and surprised at the fact that in the palmy days of 
his ancestors, Kirjathsepher was a library city of his 
own people. Until the evolutionist is able to fur- 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 47 

nish 11s an example of a race which has lifted 
itself out of barbarism, and continued its march 
upward, apart from the power which a revealed 
knowledge of God gives, we may be excused from 
accepting his hypothesis as final. 

But be that as it may, it will hardly be denied 
that evolution gives a very poor account of the 
origin of religion. To be sure, if we identify it 
with that which is merely accidental, or with that 
which bears to it some outward resemblance, it will 
be easy enough to see progress. Nothing is easier 
than to arrange religious phenomena in a series 
from the lowest to the highest, and to assume that 
this series represents a historical development. But 
nothing is more misleading. If Paul is right, then 
degeneration is the outstanding fact in religious 
history, and the fault of the modern theory is that 
it mistakes the last product of degeneracy for the 
facts of a primitive religion. 

Allow me to state a few of the reasons why the 
theory of development as applied to religion must 
be rejected. 

For one thing, it requires that faith be generated 
out of its negation, and devotion, to arise in a state 
where the ideas which create it do not exist. But 



148 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

you cannot evolve religion out of its negation, and 
that superstitious atheism out of which evolution 
seeks to evolve it is its negation. 

And then, too, it is just as impossible to generate 
religion out of terror or man's highest ideas out of 
his most dismal fears. The terrible only terrifies, 
and nothing is so fatal to religion as terror. And 
religion has never been a terrible thing to man. 
On the contrary, it has always been his comfort 
in sorrow, his strength in weakness, the light that 
has cheered him in darkness, and the power 
which has given him the victory over all his 
fears. If fear had created religion, then that per- 
fect love which is its very life, and which, as we 
are told, " casteth out fear " would have been its 
destruction. Clearly, then, we have not traced re- 
ligion to its source when we have traced it to some 
mere notion of God, however derived. First and 
last, religion is the mutual and sympathetic relation 
between self-conscious and personal beings, or as we 
have already seen, the communion of the soul with 
a personal God. Accordingly, the knowledge which 
is essential is the knowledge of a person, the kind 
of knowledge which is made possible alone through 
a self-revelation. 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 49 

And this being the case, two things are necessary : 
the one a movement of God to man, the other a 
movement of man to God. Without this religion 
cannot exist, for the reason that it is out of such 
mutual and voluntary relations that it is born. 

Now, there is an old but very significant story 
which explains how this happened. It tells us of 
how that in the still evening hour, when the wind 
rustled mysteriously in the tree tops, God walked in 
the garden where the first created dwelt. Of how 
God there met man, made Himself known, and im- 
pressed upon his spirit a divine vision that could 
not be effaced. It matters little as to what criti- 
cism may make of this story, whether it be regarded 
as actual history in the modern sense, or simply a 
pious legend. Nevertheless, it states a fact, and 
affords the only possible account of how mankind 
received the thought of God, and with it religion. 
For, as we have just seen, the thought came not 
through introspection or by a gradual process of de- 
velopment out of atheistic superstitions. But if it 
came through neither of these it must have come 
from the outside. Its source must be traced to a 
self-revelation of God to man, a manifestation at 
once external and sensuous. 



150 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

And then, too, it must have been in the nature of 
man to make response to the divine movement from 
without. Apart from such predisposition no out- 
ward manifestation even could have been effective. 
But, created as he had been for God, with soul rest- 
less and unsatisfied without Him, man beheld in the 
self-revealed the One for whom his soul yearned, 
yielded himself, and experienced God as a living 
and personal power. And that was the birth-hour 
of religion in the world. Its existence is as old as 
man's. It began with him ; his birth was its. 

And what took place when religion first entered 
the world has in all that is essential taken place 
wherever it has since lived. Wherever it* has been 
experienced as a power within, it has been for the 
reason that somehow God has approached man from 
without and made himself known in the conscious- 
ness as a personal being in whom the soul could im- 
plicitly trust and with whom it might enter into 
communion. 

But this brings us to another very important 
question ; the one which concerns itself with the 
seat of religion in the soul. For, let it be granted 
that the religious thought of God rests on data given 
in consciousness, are we even then quite sure that 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF REUGION. 151 

the thought corresponds with the reality ? Are we 
certain that God is really such as we think Him 
to be, and is our religious as trustworthy as is our 
other knowledge ? Now, it is obvious that in de- 
termining this question no single one of our facul- 
ties is to be considered to the exclusion of the rest. 
All are to be consulted, for the reason that all have 
a vote on the matter. If the religious thought of 
God comes as the result of God's revelation of Him- 
self within all the complex activities of the human 
soul ; if it is adapted to man in the totality of his be- 
ing, then is the thought of God true because in con- 
formity with reality. But before it can be so accepted 
the whole being of man must be co-operative in the 
reception of this self-revelation, as well as met and 
filled in the form which the revelation itself takes. 
And that is to say, that if religious knowledge is 
real, it must rest on precisely the same basis as our 
other knowledge. And real knowledge, as Dr. Car- 
penter has indicated, does not rest " on any one set 
of experiences, but upon our unconscious co-ordi- 
nation of the whole aggregate of our experience ; 
not on the conclusions of any one train of reasoning, 
but on the convergence of all lines of thought 
towards one center." 



152 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

But does religious knowledge conform to this 
test ? Does it rest upon the whole aggregate of our 
experiences, and is it the product of the convergence 
of all lines of thought to one center ? Before we 
can intelligently answer that question we must in- 
quire as to the seat of religion in the soul. 

You must be aware that its seat has often been 
located in one or another of our faculties. Schleier- 
macher found it in feeling. You will recall his 
definition of religion to which reference was made 
in the preceding lecture, in which he defines it as 
" the immediate consciousness of the Deity as He is 
found in ourselves and in the world." L,et us own 
that few have possessed a better understanding of its 
real essence than this great philosopher and repre- 
sentative of mystico-romanticism. He understood 
it for the reason that he himself had entered into its 
experiences and made it his own possession. Never- 
theless he made too much of the emotional side, and 
fell into the error of locating the seat of religion in 
feeling. But for this there was reason. For what 
great reformer has not at some point overstepped 
the precise limits of fact in his zeal to bring to the 
minds of others the great truth of which he felt him- 
self to be possessed ? It was the revolt of Schleier- 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 53 

macher's soul against the falsehoods embodied in 
the arid Deism of the eighteenth century, which 
reduced religion to a collection of rational doctrines 
about God that forced him to the opposite extreme. 
The age needed to be recalled to the fact that re- 
ligion is an experience to be enjoyed rather than to 
be explained ; to be lived rather than to be dogma- 
tized about. This was the mission of Schleier- 
macher. And if we bear this fact in mind we will 
readily excuse the error into which he fell in his 
efforts to stem the tide of dogmatism which then 
and often since has threatened the very life of re- 
ligion. Yet for all this he had his disciples, and 
there are even yet many who find the seat of religion 
where he found it. With Schleiermacher religion 
begins in feeling. It is to be traced to the feeling 
of " absolute dependence." Given this sense of de- 
pendence, this consciousness of profound need, and 
out of it there will come religion. Feeling is the 
germ, religion is the product. 

Now, if we consider the subject but casually, 
it will indeed seem that he was justified in his 
opinion. For is it not the consciousness of our 
needs that always drives us to God? Is it not 
true that when Jeshurun waxed fat, " he forsook 



154 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

God which made him, and lightly esteemed the 
rock of his salvation? " And was not Mr. L,owell 
right when he spoke of persons who "had the idea 
of God fattened out of them " ? And did not Jesus 
Himself say, " Come unto me, all ye that labor and 
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest?" It 
would seem that in the measure that we are op- 
pressed by a sense of our needs prayer arises, and 
that, contrariwise, a sense of self-sufficiency is de- 
structive of that devotion which, as we have seen, 
is a vital element in religion. 

And surely the world in which we live presents 
enough to remind us of our littleness and to 
force home upon the soul a sense of its depend- 
ence upon a power over us and above us. Forces 
titanic, and against which our little strength af- 
fords no defence, terrify us and seem bent on our 
destruction. We feel ourselves helpless against a 
thousand evils which seem to mock our weak- 
ness. Behind every object some evil lurks. Suf- 
fering is the common lot of all. A little brief 
struggle and it is all over — death wins his victory 
at last. Well, is it any wonder that man, thus con- 
stantly reminded of his weakness, feels his need of 
help ? On its face it does certainly seem that feel- 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 55 

ing is the seat of religion, and that Schleiermacher 
was right when he traced it to a sense of depend- 
ence. And yet if we look a little deeper, we will 
discover our mistake. For how would it be if we 
were entirely ignorant of the existence of a sym- 
pathetic and all-powerful God above us ? Would we 
then give ourselves to prayer? Suppose that we 
possessed no knowledge whatever of a spiritual 
Being above us ; that, so far as we knew, the heavens 
were tenantless ; or that back of the storm and earth- 
quake and pestilence we found no one powerful 
enough to hold them in leash — would our sense of 
weakness then drive us to prayer ? Take away the 
intellectual conviction that a personal God exists, 
and you have silenced every prayer, for the reason 
that you have taken away a knowledge of the other 
Self to whom all prayer is addressed. It is, after all, 
a knowledge more or less positive that there is One 
able to help, and that our complaints enter into His 
ears that gives inspiration to prayer. Men do not 
tell their woes to the storm or seek help from the 
waves when they clap their hands or open their jaws 
to engulf. 

Postulate the existence of God, and then a sense 
of need may drive us to Him. But back of the 



156 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

prayer and underlying the consciousness of need, 
there must exist the conviction that He is, and that 
He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, 
before religion can come into being. Apart from 
such a knowledge and belief, men do not pray. 
Feeling is, indeed, essential. Without it religion 
would never be born in the soul. But more than 
feeling is necessary to make religion real. It is 
your Jobs and your Davids, possessed of a knowl- 
edge of God and His nature, from whose lips there 
comes the confession, " In my distress I cried unto 
the L,ord, and He heard me." No, a sense of need 
is not sufficient. It may and does afford a motive 
to religion when once a knowledge of God is pos- 
sessed ; but apart from such knowledge it but leads 
to despair. 

But are we then to find the seat of religion in 
knowledge? There have been many who have 
held this opinion, and there are many who hold it 
still. They tell us that, "what we need above all 
things is knowledge." I quote from one of the 
foremost educators of the present this statement : 
" If one is concerned about religion, and believes re- 
ligion to be a most potent force for good in human 
affairs, it is his business to teach the world the 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 57 

reason why it should believe in God. This is the 
most tremendous question of both philosophy and 
religion." Now, I think that no one will deny that 
knowledge, and by this term we, of course, mean a 
knowledge of God, is essential. In the nature of 
the case, communion with a Being who has for the 
mind no existence, is impossible. But we have not 
traced religion to its source when we have made 
the discovery that its roots take firm hold 011 
knowledge. It is true, that the one solid intel- 
lectual conviction upon which it rests, is that of the 
actual existence of a personal God — a God who, for 
the reason that He is personal, is able to respond to 
prayer. It may be admitted that, without such 
knowledge there can be no prayer, and, as a conse- 
quence, no religion. Subtract this knowledge and 
there would remain the sense of awe of natural 
forces, of sublimity as one looks at the ocean and 
landscape and sky ; of wonder and delight in the 
steady march of nature's laws ; but no religion, be- 
cause there would be no response to the soul in its 
upper quest. 

And then, too, if we turn backward, we find that 
the days in the history of the ancient and modern 
world, when religion faded out of public life, have 



158 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

been days in which men somehow have ceased to 
believe in God. If France is still more than half 
irreligious it is because the philosophy of the day 
fails to discover God. If it be true that a large 
part of the scientific world is irreligious to-day, it is 
because its philosophy has been in a large measure 
materialistic and has found no place for God. Side 
by side, a knowledge of God and religion have 
always existed. So intimately are they related as 
to suggest the thought that the latter is dependent 
on the former and springs out of it. Nevertheless, 
such a conclusion is not warranted by the facts. 
Men may know all that can be intellectually known 
about God and remain utterly irreligious. Indeed, 
in the soil of mere intellectualism religion has 
always sickened and died. Wherever religion is 
regarded merely as a matter of knowledge, there the 
tyranny of intellectualism is soon felt. It is sure 
to overrate the value of correct conceptions of faith 
to the detriment of the spiritual life and to con- 
found a subjective conception of truth with the 
truth itself. 

Open, if you please, the history of Scholasticism. 
Read the record of the times in which men of 
gigantic intellect strove and wrestled with dis- 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 59 

tinctions aud deductions and ramifications touch- 
ing the nature of God until nothing was left 
but a metaphysical Deity, for whom men could 
feel neither reverence nor affection. Would any- 
one say that, so far as intellectual conception at 
least was concerned, a knowledge of God was then 
wanting? It was an age of dogma, of close and 
well reasoned deductions as touching the Divine 
substance. It was an age prolific in dictionary 
titles and fine spun deductions, which sought to put 
in speech and verify to the reason the being and 
nature of the One whose best manifestations are 
always to the humble. It was an age which 
boasted of its reasoned knowledge of God, and from 
the icy grasp of which theology has hardly yet 
escaped. But did all this knowledge about God 
make men religious ? Does the history of Ration- 
alism, headed by Wolf, who sought with mathemat- 
ical clearness and precision to define God and to give 
to the world a Deity stripped of mystery, prove the 
conclusion that knowledge about God is the source 
of religion ? Read the story of the long and weary 
years that followed in the wake of Scholasticism ; 
when Jesus was silenced that audience might be 
given to the pagan Aristotle. Or turn to the 



l6o THE NATURE OF GOD. 

record of trie times which followed its revival in 
Germany, and you will agree with Hurst that 
" Rationalism in Germany, without Pietism as its 
forerunner, would have been fatal for centuries." 
No doubt a knowledge of God precedes that com- 
munion which is the essence of religion. But it is 
not that kind of knowledge which men usually have 
in mind when they speak of a " well defined knowl- 
edge of God." The truth is, that this pedantic and 
reasoned knowledge is subversive of true piety. It 
is sure to mistake the faith by which we believe for 
the faith which is believed, and to substitute a doc- 
trine of faith for faith itself. To the religious soul 
God is indeed the " high and lofty One who inhab- 
iteth eternity, whose name is holy, who dwelleth in 
the high and holy place." But to all such He is 
also a Father and friend at the very moment that 
He is the inscrutable. No, the power which makes 
religion, the power which satisfies the soul and 
frees it from earthly things, the power which in 
religion perfects both the individual and the national 
life, belongs to it by virtue, not of the comprehen- 
sible, but of the incomprehensible, which transcends 
human thought and understanding. The power 
of religion lies in the mystery through which it 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. l6l 

leads to God, the incomprehensible Being, whom 
the understanding alone cannot reach. The moment 
God is denned, or His nature arrived at by a logical 
process, He ceases to be God and degenerates into 
a metaphysical abstraction with which communion 
cannot be held and from which help cannot be 
derived. 

And that is to say, that the knowledge and the 
feeling which prepare the way for religion, is a par- 
ticular kind of knowledge and a particular kind of 
feeling. A mere indefinite feeling of need is not 
sufficient to compel the eyes to look upward or the 
soul to pray. It is that particular kind of feeling 
which prompts to the seeking of a person, and 
which as unerringly impels the soul to seek the 
Living and personal God as its deliverer from dis- 
tress, as the particular kind of feeling which we 
call thirst, impels to the water which satisfies it. 
It is this definiteness, this self-consciousness, if you 
please, of the feeling that makes it distinctively 
religious, and differentiates it from a variety of 
feelings induced by our multiplied necessities. It 
is not the feeling that something is needed, but 
that God is needed, that gives it its character and 
value. Other needs may lead the soul somewhere ; 



1 62 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

but it is this particular need which finds its answer 
in a person, and which invariably turns to a per- 
sonal being that makes for religion. The same is 
true of knowledge. At last the only knowledge 
that opens and prepares the way for religion is the 
knowledge that the God who is sought is a person. 
No other knowledge can be taken into account. A 
knowledge of a deity, other than personal, were 
such knowledge possible, would not tend to religion 
but away from it. All through, it is the personal 
element, entering into the feeling as well as into 
the knowledge, that gives importance to each, and 
which makes it possible for us to classify them as 
distinctly religious. 

But if the beginning of religion is to be found 
neither in feeling nor knowledge, is it not then to be 
traced to that realm of our nature which we call 
the volitional? It will be admitted, that in that 
supreme moment when the soul yields itself in 
glad self-surrender to God, religion is born. Being 
the life of God in the soul, it must needs wait until 
the soul opens itself to God. And this plainly is 
an act of the will. Beside the door of the heart 
stands this keeper, without whose consent no one 
can enter. It is this ability of the will to close the 



ORIGIN, SKAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 63 

door, even in the face of God, which Jesus recog- 
nizes when He says, " Behold, I stand at the door 
and knock. If any man hear my voice and open 
the door, I will come in and sup with him and he 
with me." And this fellowship which Christ prom- 
ises to all who open the door is religion. It begins 
when man yields himself to God to control and to 
dwell in. Apparently, then, the seat of religion is 
to be found in the will, since its rise in the soul is 
conditioned upon its act. And yet, if we look a 
little further, we will again discover our mistake. 
For, after all, no act of the will is purely arbitrary. 
The will itself is determined in its activity by both 
desire and knowledge. We will what our desires 
crave, and this craving is again dependent on knowl- 
edge. Indeed, the deeper we look into the matter 
the more thoroughly will we be convinced that 
neither of our functions act alone, but rather in 
harmony with all the rest. That our personality 
acts as a unit, and that whether we think or feel or 
will, our entire self, and not a part of us, is brought 
into activity. And that is to say, that the seat of 
religion is the entire self-conscious person. Its 
home is no one part or province of our nature, no 
one disposition or faculty of the soul. It embraces 



164 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

the whole mind, the entire man. Its seat is the 
center of human nature and its circumference is 
the uttermost limit of all its energies. The cry of 
the whole self is for God, and it is to this cry that 
religion makes response. And this fact imparts to 
religious knowledge its certainty. It is the kind of 
knowledge which rests on the co-ordination of the 
whole aggregate of our experiences, and in the 
reception of which the whole being of man co-oper- 
ates. 

I wish now to call your attention to the peculiar 
content of that experience which comes as a result 
of the soul's surrender to God. It would not be 
stating the case correctly to say, that as a result of 
such surrender God's attitude to us is in anywise 
changed. He abides ever the same ; the One with 
whom is "no variableness, neither shadow of turn- 
ing." It is the change in our attitude to Him that 
makes it possible for Him to draw nigh unto us 
and to fill us with all the riches of His infinite full- 
ness. The little plant, hidden away in the dark 
crevice of the rocks where the winter's snow lingers, 
makes no change in the sun when it is transplanted 
to the sunny side of the mountain. But its change 
of attitude to the sun alters the relation of the sun 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 65 

to it. So, likewise, from the moment of self-sur- 
render, God is brought into new and different rela- 
tions to the soul. He stands no longer without, 
but within, and on account of His indwelling, 
quickens the soul with new life and fills it with 
new experiences. Later on, I shall call your atten- 
tion to the proof afforded in the peculiar nature of 
these experiences in confirmation of the fact that 
God is a personal Being. Meanwhile, let us see 
just what these experiences are. 

Now, when we speak of religion as a new life, a 
life of God in the soul, it is important that we 
should know just what kind of experiences we 
have in mind. Of course, in some of its features 
this experience will be variable. We are not alike, 
nor do objective realities affect us in precisely the 
same way. Allowance must, of course, be made for 
those differences in disposition and constitution 
which characterize us as distinct individuals, and 
which give a peculiar tone to everything that af- 
fects us. But when all allowance is made for the 
accidental, and that alone is left which is essential 
and invariable, it will be found that three distinct 
experiences characterize the religious life. 

The first is that of a consciousness of recon- 



1 66 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

ciliation — a sense of being at peace with God. 
The consciousness that that estrangement which 
once existed between the soul and God has given 
place to mutual friendship, and that the relations 
which now exist are those which grow out of love. 
In a word, it is the experience to which the Script- 
ures give the characteristic epithet, " Peace with 
God." 

A SECOND experience is the consciousness that 
a new life has taken possession of the soul. That 
the old life of the flesh with its carnal lusts and 
selfish aims has given place to a life of the Spirit, in 
which the individual acknowledges himself as being 
in the possession of new affections, new motives, in 
short, recognizes himself as being a " new creature." 
And this new life is not simply a change in one's 
mental attitude to things. It is a change in the 
innermost self, and is always accompanied by the 
overpowering consciousness that the individual is 
not what he once was. It is the sense that the life 
which now lives within, is in no sense his own, but 
that of another, who has now taken up His dwell- 
ing within, and who, by such indwelling, has trans- 
formed his very personality into the moral sub- 
stance of God. In the expressive phraseology of the 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 167 

Scripture, the experience is that of being in pos- 
session of a" new heart." 

A Third experience of the religious life is that 
of being controlled by a power which is not alone 
from within, but also from without. Prior to the 
act of self-surrender, in which religion begins, the 
dominant motive of aim and act is primarily selfish, 
" My will ; my advancement ; my well being," in 
a word, self, is the umpire to which everything is 
referred. But after the act of self-surrender, self is 
lost in the will and service of another, whose rights 
are now recognized as superior to those of self, and 
whose service has become the supremest delight. 
And this recognition of a will other than our own, 
to which every act is referred, is, perhaps, the most 
pronounced of all religious experiences. In obedi- 
ence to this will the religious soul finds its highest 
delight, experiences a sense of perfect security, and 
is made partaker of that joy which is the sure re- 
ward of all who truly yield themselves to it. 

These three experiences, then, the experience of 
reconciliation with a person above and other than 
self ; the consciousness of a new life dwelling 
within, and the sense of being controlled by a 
supreme will from without, are the invariable char- 



1 68 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

acteristics of religious experience. Not that they 
are distinct and separate in time, but that when the 
total of all that is given in the religious conscious- 
ness is analyzed, these three elements are found to 
constitute and impart to it its distinctive char- 
acter. 

Well, now, when these experiences are rightly 
considered, when we take them just as they are 
given in the consciousness, what, I ask, is the con- 
clusion to which they point ? If we are to trust the 
facts of our consciousness, and if experience counts 
for anything, are we not to conclude that these par- 
ticular experiences to which religion testifies are 
produced by personal contact with a Being other 
than self ? For the thing which enters into each 
of these separate experiences and which imparts to 
them a distinct significance, is just this personal ele- 
ment which constitutes the very nerve of religion. 
They are all experiences such as could not possibly 
arise out of any relation which we sustain to an un- 
conscious power or influence outside of us. No 
power other than that which goes forth from a 
person could possibly produce the result. 

Nor are these experiences given in the religious 
consciousness, such as an idea or mere abstraction, 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 69 

however exalted, would be capable of effecting. One 
and all, they require a personal being to give them 
reality. One and all, they are identical with those 
which in a proportionate degree grow out of our re- 
lations with our fellows. Nothing short of a self- 
conscious person above and apart from us will meet 
the case or afford a rational explanation of the ex- 
periences just as they are given. We have either to 
deny the experiences altogether, or accept the con- 
clusion, to which on account of their distinctive 
character, they infallibly point. In order that this 
statement may be vindicated, let us for a moment 
revert to these experiences and consider them one 
by one. 

Take the first. The consciousness of reconcili- 
ation, the sense of being at peace with a being out- 
side of us, which follows on the act of self-surrender. 
Is this experience, in the shape in which it is given 
in the consciousness, capable of being produced by 
a power other than personal ? Do men desire to be 
reconciled with a blind power, no matter how great 
or how threatening? In the presence of such a 
power we may feel dread ; we may fear its effects 
and endeavor to escape from it. But there is no 
desire whatever to be reconciled with it, or a sense 



170 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

that we are out of moral harmony with it. Men 
die, cursing without compunction the power that 
slays them, and without even a thought of possible 
moral harmony existing between themselves and it. 
They know that as between themselves and imper- 
sonal power, moral harmony is not to be thought of. 
Between the human soul and the powers resident in 
earthquake or storm or pestilence, such harmony is 
out of the question. Reconciliation is a term appli- 
cable alone to self-conscious beings between whom, 
for any reason, there has grown an estrangement. 
The emotions which prompt to the seeking of it are 
by no trick of speech, to be identified with those 
feelings which are awakened in us by either fear or 
dread. We do seek to escape a power. We do seek 
to interpose some barrier between it and ourselves 
behind which we may hide and feel ourselves safe. 
But with persons, we seek to be reconciled. And 
this, not on account of fear of injury which 
they may possibly do us. Fear is incapable of 
awakening those desires which prompt us to seek 
reconciliation. They always spring out of a sense 
of self-reproach, the consciousness that we have 
wronged another. A true conception of reconcili- 
ation always involves the fact of moral estrange- 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. I/I 

ment and a sense of personal guilt, deepened by 
the moral worth of the one from whom by our own 
acts we have estranged ourselves. 

And it is this that prompts to the seeking of rec- 
onciliation with God. Paul located it rightly when 
he said, "It is the goodness of God " that prompts 
to repentance. The same fact is brought out in the 
story of the prodigal. Sitting there among the 
swine, hungry and in rags, he thinks of his home 
and the father whom he had wronged in the day 
that he turned his back upon both and chose the 
life of the wanton. But when he turns his steps 
homeward, it is reconciliation that he seeks. Yet it 
is not fear that prompts his return. On the con- 
trary, it is the remembrance of the goodness of his 
father and his own baseness that brought about the 
estrangement. It was so also with the Psalmist : 
" I remembered God," says he, " and was troubled." 
What was it that troubled him? Not that he 
feared the vengeance of a blind and unconscious 
power. Such trouble as that which came to him is 
not the child of fear, but of self-reproach. It was 
when he " considered the days of old," the years of 
ancient times and the goodness of the One whom he 
had sinned against and forgotten, that the baseness 



172 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

of his estrangement appeared in its true light and 
gave birth to a longing for reconciliation. No, this 
desire is not the desire to be in harmony with an im- 
sonal power. No unconscious force or agency, no 
creation of the mind possesses vitality enough to 
call it into being. It comes out of a sense of moral 
estrangement between persons. Personal relations, 
moral considerations alone, can account for it. Ac- 
cordingly, if this experience of moral disharmony 
be a fact given in consciousness ; if the sense of 
being reconciled with a Being above us, which fol- 
lows on the act of self-surrender, be a real experi- 
ence, then God is a person al Being. Apart from 
His personality, neither could be real, for the reason 
that personality is required to give them reality. 

But take now the second experience : I mean that 
of a new life within. The consciousness of a life so 
distinct from the old life of the flesh and so truly 
of the Spirit as to be explicable alone in the light of 
the indwelling of a person- other than self. If not 
fully at the moment of self-surrender, yet clearly 
traceable to that act, the religious soul is certain to 
recognize himself as being a " new creature " ; dom- 
inated by new affections, new thoughts and new 
purposes. In all that makes him the person that he 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 73 

now recognizes himself as being, he knows himself 
to be different from the being he once was. 

It will be granted that at any particular moment 
we know ourselves as we know nothing else. We 
may hide ourselves from others ; we may close 
every avenue through which a knowledge of our- 
selves may come to others ; but no one can hide a 
knowledge of himself from himself. We know what 
we are in our very inmost. Everyone knows the 
precise character of the thoughts which are his, the 
affections which have their home in his heart and 
the motives which govern his life. Self-knowledge 
is inseparable from self-consciousness. But we not 
only know ourselves. We are able also to distin- 
guish between our own thoughts, affections and 
purposes and the thoughts, affections and purposes 
of another. We are able to say of this particular 
thought or of this particular affection, " This is 
mine " ; and of another particular thought or affec- 
tion, " This is not mine, this is foreign to me." It 
is this ability to distinguish between what belongs 
to us as individuals and what belongs to another 
that makes it possible for one to affirm of the life 
which, after the moment of self-surrender, inhabits 
him, that it is not the life of self, but that of another. 



174 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

When, for instance, the miser, with heart set on 
gold, and to whom no greater sacrifice could come 
than the loss of his treasures, finds himself suddenly 
released and dominated by new affections to such a 
degree as that he finds delight in enriching others 
with the treasures wmich he once worshiped, he 
knows that the new affection is not rightly his 
own, that it does not belong to the old self, but to 
the new by which he is now inhabited. Or when 
the one who finds his chief gratification in the in- 
dulgence of those base passions to which innocence 
and virtue alike appeal in vain, suddenly finds 
within a new self, looking with shame and con- 
tempt on the former self, he knows the new to be 
different from the old, for the reason that by it the 
old is condemned and cast out as an intruder. Nor 
does anyone to whom these experiences of a new 
life have been a reality, for a moment refer the 
change to a different intellectual conception of 
things. He knows that it is to be referred to noth- 
ing else than the control of a new spirit dwelling 
within. In short, he recognizes himself as being a 
new person, different in moral substance from the 
person he once was. So complete has been the 
transformation as that he now regards his former 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 75 

self as " dead," and in the light of the new con- 
sciousness, declares himself as being in the very 
fiber of his moral personality, different from the per- 
son he once was. But how, I ask, is this experi- 
ence to which the religious soul testifies, in which 
the old life gives place to the new and which is 
sure to follow on the act of self-surrender — how 
is this experience to be explained except on the ad- 
mission that a new self has actually taken the place 
of the old ? For, let it be remembered, that the 
experience of a new life is not to be referred to a 
change in one's intellectual or emotional attitude to 
things. It is not a toning up of moral conduct or 
even the determination to live a life well-pleasing 
to God. It is not a determination of the will mani- 
festing itself in the output of good deeds, the fixing 
of some moral program of life, or, indeed, anything 
that pertains to the outward. The experience is that 
of a new life within, the consciousness of being con- 
trolled in the very inmost by new thoughts, new af- 
fections and a new will. In a word, it is the con- 
sciousness of the indwelling of a new self. It is an 
experience utterly incapable of being expressed in 
terms other than those which we are obliged to use 
when we speak of persons. It has to do with the 



176 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

very foundation substance which lies back of all our 
activities. It is the experience of being occupied 
in the field of the very inmost by new moral forces. 
And it is just because the change effected is in the 
very inmost that it affects the whole field of our per- 
sonality that it is incapable of being referred to 
physical or intellectual causes. It is easy enough 
to account for transformations in the realm of the 
physical. Experience teaches us that, back of all 
such changes there lies a physical cause. Standing 
on the slopes of the Wengern Alp, I have seen the 
dark mist rise out of the gorges, and as it slowly 
emerged into the light, take on itself a lighter hue, 
until at last, kissed by the sunlight that fell aslant 
the peaks, it was transfigured into the gorgeous sheen 
of the rainbow. But the change in the mist cloud 
was not referred to a spiritual cause. Significant 
as it was, it was but a change in the physical and 
wrought by physical agencies. It belonged to the 
appearance only ; for the mist, in spite of the glory 
imparted to it by the sunlight, remained what it 
was. And so, too, in the realm of the intellectual, 
revolutions may take place. Change in intellectual 
attitude is the usual accompaniment of enlarged ex- 
perience and deeper insight into truth. "When I 



ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 77 

was a child I spake as a child, I thought as a 
child, I understood as a child ; but when I became 
a man I put away childish things," is the utterance 
of one into whose intellectual experience there had 
come many conceptual revolutions. And yet, in 
the roots of his nature he remained the same that 
he was. His change in intellectual attitude did not 
effect a change in the man. It never brought from 
his lips the confession that it had made him a " new 
creature." It is quite a different thing from a 
change in mental attitude to which this same one 
refers when he speaks of "putting off the old man 
with his deeds and putting on the new, which, 
after God, is created in righteousness and true holi- 
ness." And it is just this latter, this change in the 
innermost life, this experience of being occupied by 
a new self to which religious experience univers- 
ally testifies. 

A little further on we shall inquire into the trust- 
worthiness of this along with other experiences 
characteristic of the religious life. Meanwhile, 
assuming that this particular experience is to be 
trusted, and that it is correctly described when it is 
spoken of as the sense of being possessed by a new 
will and new affections, permit me to ask, what can 



1J& THE NATURE OF GOD. 

it mean but that a new self has taken possession ? 
Apart from another self, in whom this new will, 
these new affections and this new mind reside, they 
are but abstractions, utterly incapable of affecting 
the consciousness. It is their unity in a self-con- 
scious being that makes them real and imparts to 
them their power to control. And this person, 
whose indwelling is confirmed in the experience of 
being possessed by a new will and new affections and 
new purposes, religion affirms to be none other than 
the One of whom it is said, " He dwelleth in you 
and shall be in you." 

But the third experience to which religion testi- 
fies is that of an external and personal control. It 
recognizes the existence of a will other than its own 
or that of the community to which it yields itself 
gladly, seeking ever to know what this will is, in 
order that it may be obedient to it. And this sense 
of being controlled by a Supreme will is, as already 
intimated, among the most pronounced and signifi- 
cant facts given in the religious consciousness. It 
is the inner certainty of such control to which is to 
be traced those experiences of joy, of confidence and 
of abiding security which enter so largely into the 
saintly life. 



i 7 9 

And thus, while recognizing the indwelling of a 
new self, religion also bears witness to the constant 
presence and overrule of a Being outside of self, 
yet one with the new self who dwells within. The 
Being with whom the religious soul has to do is 
accordingly both immanent and transcendent. Im- 
manent in the new personality resident in the soul ; 
transcendent, in the One outside of self and to whom 
it yields itself in willing and glad surrender. But 
this control of which religion speaks, is not that of 
an arbitrary power, or even an almighty will apart 
from a person. The content of the experience is 
not exhausted in the mere conception of a govern- 
ing will, however mighty. It is the experience 
of the control of a will, behind which is a being 
altogether worthy ; a being whose very worthiness 
gives to this will the only authority which it can 
rightfully hold over a free and rational being. For 
mere will, backed even by absolute power, were 
such a thing possible, would be wanting in that 
authority by which a true man will allow himself 
to be controlled. Mere will, did such a thing exist, 
may be capricious and arbitrary. It may be bent 
on our moral ruin — may be selfish, vindictive and 
even cruel. It is the kind of will that settles for 



180 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

the worthy man the question of the authority which 
it shall have over him. In other words, it is the 
moral character of the person whose will it is, that 
gives it its authority. It is because it is his will, 
or her will ; the will of one whose worthiness we 
acknowledge that gives to will its control over free 
and rational men. 

When Thomas Carlyle wrote on the tombstone 
of his wife, " In all that I have done or attempted 
that was worthy, she was my companion spirit," he 
owned himself as having been controlled by a will 
other than his own. But it was because this will 
was the will of one whom he loved and whose un- 
selfish devotion to him vested it with the right of 
control, that it became the governing influence of 
his life. 

And so, when the religious soul speaks of a will 
other than his own to which he acknowledges him- 
self to be subject ; or when he seeks to know this 
will in order that he may render obedience to it, he 
has in mind a person, a self-conscious being, in 
whom this will resides and whose it is. When he 
speaks of the experience of being cared for and 
defended, of being beset behind and before, he has 
in mind a person whose watchful eyes are upon him 



i8i 

and whose almighty arm is his defence. It is to 
his conscious relations to such an One that he refers 
all those experiences that make for his joy, his sense 
of safety in the present, and that confidence for the 
future which comes out of a sense that he is under 
the convoy of a personal yet almighty friend who 
will permit no evil to befall him. 

And thus, when religious experience is traced to 
its source and its content analyzed, we are forced 
back to a self-conscious person as its only possible 
explanation. All its relations are personal. They 
all require a personal being to make them valid. 
Its experiences of joy, of superiority to trials, its 
sense of unconquerable power, and the fact of its 
persistent life in the world, all must be traced to a 
personal being with whom communion is held and 
from whom all that gives it meaning is derived. 
From first to last, religion requires a self-conscious 
and personal God to give it reality and to afford a 
rational interpretation of the experiences to which 
it universally and unqualifiedly testifies. 



LECTURE FIFTH. 

THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

The testimony, then, of religion to the Divine 
personality is complete and unequivocal. Your re- 
ligious soul will tell you that God is his daily com- 
panion, a being with whom he holds fellowship and 
from whom he derives help. It is the certainty of 
this conviction that keeps religion going. 

Now, at this point we might be justified in resting 
our case. For the question as to the nature of God 
is one upon which religion alone is qualified to tes- 
tify. Clearly, it is a matter of our experimental and 
not of our formal knowledge. For, if God actually 
exists, He exists in the world of realities outside of 
us, a knowledge of which is derived through ex- 
perience alone. Logic in the realm of concrete 
realities is of but little service. It can neither 
affirm or deny facts which are real, for the reason 
that it has to do with ideas and concepts alone. 
There is but one door through which our knowledge 
of real things can come, and that is the door of ex- 
perience. Accordingly, having heard the testimony 

(182) 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 83 

of religion to the fact of the Divine personality, 
the point at issue might rightly be regarded as 
proven. 

And yet, were we to stop at this point, the force 
of the argument would be seriously impaired. Cer- 
tainty in respect of facts attested depends largely 
on the character and qualifications of the witness. 
His ability to judge correctly of the facts, the actual 
knowledge which he may have of them, are to be 
taken into account. The knowledge of a compe- 
tent witness must also be first hand, and not that 
kind which is derived from the testimony of others. 
It must rest on that experience which comes from 
actual and personal contact with the facts. And 
then, too, what often passes for experience may not 
be trustworthy. It may be imaginary, and not real. 
We want to know who has had the experience ; we 
want to know something about his mental and 
physical constitution in order that we may deter- 
mine as to whether the experience to which he tes- 
tifies is such as realities, as we know them, are capa- 
ble of producing in the normal consciousness. It 
is for this reason that we must go back of the testi- 
mony which religion offers in favor of the Divine 
personality, and inquire into the trustworthiness of 



184 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

religious knowledge itself. What estimate, then, 
are we to place upon religious knowledge, and what 
degree of certainty attaches to it ? 

In the preceding lecture I called your attention 
to the fact that the certainty of our knowledge of 
things is determined largely by the answer which 
is given to the question as to whether or not all of 
our faculties have been co-operative in its reception. 
Since all truth comes from the outside, it is of the 
utmost importance to correct knowledge that it be 
rightly reported. And this is the task of no single 
one, but, on the contrary, of all of our receptive 
faculties. Each must be given its proper work to 
do, and every channel through which truth is con- 
veyed to the soul must be kept open. The same 
law applies to our religious knowledge. If it is to 
be accepted as trustworthy all of our functions must 
co-operate in its reception. When the breath of the 
Lord blows upon the harp of the soul, if harmony 
and not disharmony is to result, all of its chords 
must be responsive. The fact, therefore, that the 
religious concept of God is, as we have seen, the 
product of the co-ordinate activity of all of our re- 
ceptive functions, adds immensely to its trustworthi- 
ness. And yet, before we can rightly determine the 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 185 

degree of certainty which attaches to our religious, 
it will be necessary for us to inquire as to the rela- 
tive certainty of other kinds of knowledge. 

Now, when we come to look into the matter, we 
make the discovery that the same degree of cer- 
tainty does not attach to all kinds of knowledge. 
We are more soundly convinced of some things 
than we are of others. The distinction between 
moral certainty and that certainty which rests on 
deductions from necessary principles is a real dis- 
tinction, and one which we cannot fail practically 
to recognize. And so we classify our knowledge 
with reference to the degree of certainty which 
attaches to it ; and when we do this we find that it 
arranges itself into three distinct classes : formal 
knowledge, probable knowledge, and that kind of 
knowledge which we have of real existences out- 
side of us to which we give the name experimental. 
Let us now look at the various kinds separately in 
order that we may determine the relative certainty 
which attaches to each. L,et us begin with our 
formal knowledge. 

Now, by formal knowledge we mean the kind 
which has its basis in necessary principles. " It 
includes," says Professor Stearns, " the forms of 



1 86 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

reasoning based on necessary principles in the formal 
sciences, such as logic and mathematics. We have 
here to do with ideas, laws, relations and processes, 
but not with real existences. The intuitions are 
not things, and do not stand for things ; they are 
forms of thought which, doubtless, correspond to 
the objective forms of things, but are to be distin- 
guished from the things themselves. Logic and 
mathematics are formal sciences. But, for the pur- 
pose of these sciences the question of the corre- 
spondence of the notion with the reality is not 
essential. The notions are mere counters of thought. 
Their relation to reality is only hypothetical. Tak- 
ing it for granted, as a supposition, that these notions 
represent so and so, we ask what results will follow 
from their combination and manipulation according 
to the mathematical and logical processes." Now, 
the certainty of this kind of knowledge is absolute. 
For instance, it is absolutely certain that the same 
thing cannot be and not be at the same time. It 
is absolutely certain that the whole is equal to all 
of its parts, and so on. The term must applies to 
each and all of these propositions of our formal 
knowledge. If we think of them at all, we can 
think of them in no other wav. 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 87 

But, it may be asked, of what practical value is 
this certainty ? The answer is, but very little. In 
all those relations which most concern us it makes 
but little difference whether these propositions are 
true or false. For the peculiarity of this form of 
knowledge is that it has little or nothing to do with 
real existences. Except in a remote way, it does 
not contribute anything to our knowledge of things 
about us. Of course, if these things comprehended 
in our formal knowledge are anywhere to be found, 
the eternal verities will obtain in them. If a tri- 
angle, for illustration, exists, its three angles will be 
equal to two right ones. Or, if two parallel lines 
exist, it is certain that they will never meet. But 
none of these verities have anything to say about 
facts, or about what is or what is not in the actual 
world. All that these sciences make sure of is, that 
if these things are anywhere to be found the eternal 
verities will obtain in them. But they are primarily 
interesting only as subjective facts. They stand 
waiting in the mind, forming a beautiful net-work, 
and the most that we can say is, that we hope 
to discover outer realities over which the network 
may be flung, so that the real and the ideal may co- 
incide. 



1 88 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

And so, in any attempt that we may make to dis- 
cover the nature of God, formal knowledge cannot 
help us, for the reason that it is utterly incapable of 
throwing light on the world of the actual, in which 
God exists. So far, then, as our present inquiry is 
concerned, formal knowledge has nothing to impart. 
For what good does it do me, asks Schopenhauer, 
" to know ever so certainly w T hat I have no interest 
in? In mathematics, the mind busies itself with 
its own forms of knowledge, time and space, like a 
cat that plays with its own tail." It is only when 
the formal sciences are used in the interests of reality 
that they become of any real value. If not so used 
they are good for mental discipline, but otherwise 
they are worthless. 

And this is the place to say that the insinuating 
sneer of the skeptic at the failure of all attempts to 
demonstrate with mathematical certainty the being 
of God, is at last but a confession of his own 
ignorance. A better understanding of the nature 
of formal knowledge, and the limits by which it is 
beset would make him humble rather than con- 
temptuous. True, if God were a mere notion, or 
even a necessary principle, this method of demon- 
stration would be applicable. But just because He 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 89 

is neither, just because He is a person, possessed of 
actual existence, His being and nature are to be de- 
termined by considerations other than those which 
enter into our formal knowledge. 

But a second kind of knowledge is that to which 
we give the designation, probable. It is the kind 
which we get from books, from our teachers, from 
conversation with others, and in kindred ways. It 
is neither reasoned knowledge, based on necessary 
principles, nor yet the kind which we have gotten 
for ourselves through personal experience. It is all 
second-hand knowledge, the trustworthiness of 
which depends on the veracity of our informants, 
and their ability to sift the wheat from the chaff of 
error. The most that can be said of this form of 
knowledge is, that it is probably true ; personally, 
we are not quite certain that it conforms with 
facts. 

And yet, when one comes to analyze the sum 
total of what he calls his knowledge, and begins to 
classify it with reference to the degree of certainty 
which belongs to it, he will be surprised at the vast 
amount which he is compelled to put over into this 
class of the probable. It is true that we act on it 
and shape our conduct by it But we do so for the 



190 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

reason that it is frequently the only kind available. 
We cannot at all times put ourselves into personal 
contact with the facts, and, as a consequence, we are 
compelled to accept the testimony of those who 
have. Yet we are never quite certain of our prob- 
able knowledge, however great our confidence in 
those who have imparted it. We want to see for 
ourselves, and to bring ourselves into actual contact 
with the facts. Of course, in matters which do not 
seriously concern us we ordinarily give ourselves 
but little trouble in the way of experimental verifi- 
cation. We accept the statement for what it is 
worth. But when it becomes a matter of vital im- 
portance to know the real truth, or when conse- 
quences far-reaching are involved, we cannot be 
satisfied with knowledge which is merely probable. 
Then a man will say, " I cannot depend on the tes- 
timony of others, however truthful they may be. 
They may be honest enough, but honesty itself 
does not insure against mistakes. I will investigate 
for myself. I will get the facts at first hand, for 
what I know I really know." And he does so, for 
the reason that experience is the umpire to which 
all questions as to the certainty or uncertainty of our 
probable knowledge must at last be referred. What 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 191 

the plummet and the square do for the builder in the 
way of verifying his judgment, that experience does 
for our probable knowledge. It tests it by the test 
of actual contact with reality, and proves its cer- 
tainty by the readiness with which it conforms with 
the actual. 

Now, it is to the kind of knowledge thus derived 
to which we give the name experimental. It is 
the kind which concerns itself with those facts out 
of which our knowledge of actual existences is built. 
It takes into account all those realities which mani- 
fest themselves to, or in the consciousness through, 
our outer or our inner sense. 

It should go with the saying, that the term real 
existences does not include that inner world of ideas 
and notions which has its existence apart from actual 
objects. By it we mean those objects alone which 
are capable of producing effects in the consciousness, 
and which attest their reality by the effects which 
they are capable of producing. It will be seen at 
once, that this includes the whole world of actual 
existences outside of us, the sum total of those facts 
which form the frame-work, or rather the founda- 
tion, of all knowledge of self, of the world, of our 
fellow-men, and of God. Whatever is seen by the 



192 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

eye, heard by the ear, or is made known through 
the feeling ; in a word, whatever is capable of pro- 
ducing effects in the consciousness, belongs to the 
world of real existences. 

Now, the avenue of this particular kind of knowl- 
edge is experience. It is through experience that we 
come into possession of the facts out of which our 
knowledge of actual existence is constructed. So 
far as our knowledge of these outward realities goes, 
it is entirely experimental. We do not come into 
its possession by abstract thinking ; we are entirely 
dependent on the material given in consciousness for 
what we may know of the object itself. 

Well, when we come to see the kind of knowl- 
edge which experience gives, we at once perceive 
the vastness of its range and its actual importance. 
In fact, it includes all, or practically all, the knowl- 
edge which we value most in life. It is the kind 
which underlies all progress and which furnishes 
the material of every science. It is the kind upon 
which, in all the relations and activities of life, we 
place the greatest dependence. 

But by what right, it may be asked, do we thus 
depend on the knowledge gained through experi- 
ence, and in what does its certaintv consist ? It will 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 93 

not be denied that we do trust it. When we are 
in doubt about the supposed facts of our probable 
knowledge we always refer them to experience in 
order that we may verify them. The confidence 
which we may have in any science is based on the 
fact that its theories are not accepted on the grounds 
of their mere reasonableness, but on those of experi- 
mental tests. We feel ourselves compelled either to 
accept the testimony of experience on the one hand, 
or to deny the reality of knowledge on the other. But 
what is it that imparts to experimental knowledge 
its certainty ? I think the answer will be found in 
three things. 

First, in the fact that it is knowledge of the ob- 
ject itself derived from actual contact with it. Ideas, 
conceptions, apart from real objects, lack this cer- 
tainty. They may or may not be correct mental 
representations of the actual. But we are certain 
that the world about us is real. It does not deceive 
us. It produces actual impressions on the con- 
sciousness, and it is just these real impressions re- 
sulting from actual contact with objects which im- 
part to experimental knowledge its certainty. In 
fact, the very term experience implies real knowl- 
edge so derived. It involves the existence of objects 
13 



194 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

outside of us with which we are brought into con- 
tact. We do not experience the first principles of 
thought or the processes of logic or mathematics. 
Nor do we experience the facts of our probable 
knowledge. In every case experience implies the 
presence of real existences affecting the conscious- 
ness. Accordingly, the certainty which attaches to 
this kind of knowledge is true certainty. It rests 
on the testimony of our consciousness, a testimony 
which, as rational beings, we are bound to accept. 
There is absolutely no other tribunal to which we 
can refer our questions as to the reality or nature of 
existences outside of ourselves. It is first-hand 
knowledge, vouched for and verified by actual con- 
tact with reality. 

Now, when we speak of actual contact with real- 
ity as furnishing a true basis for knowledge, we have 
in mind the kind of contact which is complete and 
which leaves out nothing which is essential to the 
object itself. For it is obvious that contact with 
realities may be imperfect. It may touch the ob- 
ject but remotely ; or it may be had through but 
one or another of our receptive faculties. If, for 
any reason, contact has been imperfect, or if it has 
been of such a nature as to present to the conscious- 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 95 

ness an indefinite or distorted impression, then the 
trustworthiness of the knowledge based upon it will 
be impaired. 

I need but remind you that most of those strange 
beliefs in apparitions, and kindred phenomena, 
which have their existence among rude and savage 
people, are to be referred to imperfect contact with 
objects. For the most part, they are to be traced to 
faulty impressions made, or supposed to be made, 
upon one or another of the senses. For when the 
mind builds its fabric out of imperfect or distorted 
material, the structure which it builds is sure to be 
fantastic and out of harmony with reality. And in 
the working out of knowledge the mind must needs 
confine itself to the raw material mediated through 
the sense. It has no other out of which it can con- 
struct it. It cannot furnish the material of real 
knowledge out of itself. It must be furnished by 
the susceptibilities, for the reason that it is through 
these that the world of reality is touched and the 
material of knowledge furnished. Just as the car- 
penter is dependent on the material out of which 
he is to construct a building, so the mind is de- 
pendent on impressions given in the sense in the 
construction of knowledge. If, for any reason, these 



196 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

are faulty, the knowledge will be faulty. Let us 
make the matter a little clearer, if possible, by 
use of an illustration. We are alone, let us say, 
in the forest. It is that witching hour of the night 
in which, on account of the darkness and our own 
subjective moods, we are particularly open to faulty 
impressions. We hear, let us say, a sound, but 
fail to see the object from which it proceeded. 
Now, so far as the sound itself is concerned, we 
may think of it as having been distinct and definite 
enough to have impressed itself correctly on the 
consciousness. Well, out of these impressions the 
mind is warranted to go on to the construction of 
knowledge. Yet it cannot go beyond the content 
present in the consciousness. It must import noth- 
ing out of the fancy of the imagination. If the 
knowledge is to be real, it must be constructed out 
of the material actually given in consciousness. 
But while knowledge so derived will be true so far 
as it goes, it would be very far from true were the 
mind to go on from this partial contact to affirm 
anything as to the form of the object itself. To be 
sure, the sound may be associated with an object 
the form of which is already well known. In that 
case we would be warranted in going beyond the 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 97 

inere content and affirming that it proceeded from 
a bird or an insect, as the case may be. But if the 
object at the particular time, or at no time prior, 
has left an impression through the eye, as well as 
through the ear, then the mind in its work is com- 
pelled to stop with the material furnished by the 
sense of hearing alone, and cannot go on to construct 
out of itself a real knowledge of the form. And 
that is to say, that when for any reason the contact 
with the object has been imperfect or has been had 
through but one of the receptive faculties, the 
material furnished is not sufficient to construct a 
true knowledge of any particular object. 

But suppose, on the contrary, that this contact of 
which we are speaking has been perfect at all 
points ; that it has been through the eye, the ear, in 
.short, through all the sense faculties ; then, out of 
such contact the mind may construct knowledge. 
Perfection of contact, the response of all our facul- 
ties to the object, is essential to the trustworthiness 
of all knowledge which rests on experience as a 
basis. It is such contact, actual and complete, 
which we have in mind when we speak of real, 
rather than imaginary, experiences. It is the syn- 
thesis of all possible impressions made upon all our 



198 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

faculties, and the testing and the investigation of 
these impressions by the process of reflection, that 
gives to experimental knowledge its certainty. 

But there is yet another feature of this kind of 
knowledge which adds immensely to its certainty. 
I mean the possibility which it affords of verifica- 
tion by repeated experiment. Whenever this is 
possible the certainty of the knowledge is intensi- 
fied, for the reason that by repeated experiment its 
possible errors may be corrected and its facts con- 
firmed. Now, it may be admitted, that if, in the 
first instance, the contact with the object has been 
complete, the certainty of the knowledge will not 
be increased by any number of repetitions. Never- 
theless, we cannot but attach to knowledge so veri- 
fied a degree of certainty which we are unwilling 
to grant to any other. Except in extraordinary 
cases, we are not quite sure that we have been put 
into possession of all the facts by a single experi- 
ence. There is always the possibility that some- 
thing important has been omitted, or that our sub- 
jective states may have influenced in such a way as 
to have distorted the facts. In either case, the 
knowledge derived through a single experience will 
be unsatisfactory. But, if it is possible to repeat 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 99 

the experiment, to repeat it under all possible cir- 
cumstances and conditions, and if the results yet 
remain the same, the knowledge so gained will pos- 
sess additional certainty. It is, then, in the strict- 
est sense, scientific knowledge, for the reason that it 
is just through repeated experiment that science 
comes into possession of its facts. 

Take, for instance, the fact that plants of differ- 
ent variety are capable of cross-fertilization. How 
came this to be an established fact of science ? The 
answer is, that repeated experiment has confirmed 
the fact, and that the experiment is capable of being 
repeated over and over with precisely the same re- 
sult. Or, here is the chemist experimenting with 
a new explosive. He finds that under certain con- 
ditions of light and heat the normal relations be- 
tween the atoms are broken up and an explosion 
follows. Now, a single experiment may carry with 
it a certain conviction that a new fact has been dis- 
covered, and something added to the world's knowl- 
edge. But, if he repeats the experiment again and 
again, and always with the same result, would any- 
one say that the knowledge so obtained carries with 
it no additional certainty? And, if precisely the 
same results follow every experiment, does not the 



200 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

knowledge based upon these experiments approach 
that kind of certainty which we call absolute? 
We know that fire burns. Experiment, without a 
single exception, gives certainty to the knowledge. 
We know that abstinence from food produces hun- 
ger. We know that laceration of the nerves pro- 
duces pain. We know that the harvest follows 
seed time. We know that labor brings its reward, 
and that, contrariwise, idleness tendeth to poverty. 
Of all of these facts we are entirely convinced. 
The knowledge of them is certain knowledge. But 
we are certain of it, because experiment, oft re- 
peated, has taught us that the facts cannot be other- 
wise than our knowledge declares them to be. Re- 
peated experiment, with identical results, gives 
certainty to knowledge which is based upon them. 
If we are honest we are compelled to accept all 
such knowledge as real, whether we wish to do so 
or not. 

But there is yet a third quality belonging to a 
particular class of experiences which imparts, by 
common consent, to the knowledge based upon them 
a degree of certainty hardly less than absolute. I 
mean the quality which renders them capable of 
being had by all men. Confessedly there are ex- 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 201 

periences which are not, and which, on account of 
their peculiar nature, cannot be had by all alike. 
They are such as can be had by those few alone 
who, to use the phrase of Dr. Moreau, belong to 
u one of the many branches of the neuropathic 
tree." They are such as come alone to those 
geniuses which Mr. Nisbet evidently has in mind 
when he says, " Whenever a man's life is at once 
sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient 
fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he in- 
variably falls into the morbid category." Of course, 
the experiences had by such are unique, and of 
necessity, private. They are of a nature such as to 
make them possible to those alone who possess a 
temperament out of the ordinary. And, while to 
us such experiences may not impart to the knowl- 
edge based upon them the same certainty as that 
which is based on experiences more universal, yet 
to those who have had them, the certainty of the 
knowledge cannot be greater. Yet, for the most 
part we suspect it. Before we are willing to accept 
facts so certified as true, we want to know who has 
had the experience. With most of us their normal 
character and universality carry immense weight. 
And yet, in saying this, I do not mean to throw 



202 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

suspicion on all knowledge based on experiences 
which are even abnormal. Abnormality itself does 
not, of necessity, vitiate knowledge. We are to esti- 
mate, and do estimate, its value in the light of con- 
siderations other than those of the mere way in which 
such knowledge is brought to us. As a matter of 
fact, much of such knowledge has stood the fiery test. 
Much of the knowledge of which we are possessed 
could not have come to us in a way other than that 
in which it has actually come. Oft the persons 
who testify to the reality of these experiences are 
those whose veracity cannot be questioned. Fre- 
quently they have been the wisest, the holiest and 
the sanest of their generation. For it has been the 
lot of many of the great to differ radically in tem- 
perament from ordinary men. The prophets, the 
seers, the reformers, the geniuses, the leaders of 
every generation, have often possessed the neurotic 
temperament. Paul, who was caught up into the 
third heaven, and who heard things which "it is 
not lawful for man to utter," probably belonged to 
this class. To it belonged a Luther who testifies to 
having seen the arch enemy of man. To it be- 
longed Savonarola, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and John 
Mazzini. And to it also belonged the lone exile 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 203 

of Patmos, who "beheld the new Jerusalem de- 
scending out of heaven as a bride adorned for her 
husband." 

But time would fail me to speak of the great and 
the good, who, just because of their peculiar tem- 
perament, have stood on the mountain peaks be- 
holding the first rays of the morning and hearing 
the voices which, out of the to-morrows, ever speak 
to the responsive soul. Prophets, seers they have 
often been — the men and the women of whom the 
world was not worthy. What if the experiences 
which came to them were out of the normal? 
What if the more phlegmatic among us have never 
had them ? Their trustworthiness is not on that 
account to be impeached or their value depre- 
ciated. 

The knowledge based on these experiences has 
often been the newest and the best. Oft it has re- 
quired the lapse of centuries for men of ordinary 
mold to climb into the bright light in the radi- 
ance of which it was the privilege of these to stand 
and to rightly appreciate the knowledge which 
they have given to the world. 

"What right have we to believe," asks Dr. 
Maudsley, " that nature is under any obligations to 



204 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

do her work by means of complete minds only ? 
She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable 
instrument for a particular purpose. It is the 
work done and the quality of the worker by which 
it was done that is alone of moment. . . . The last 
resort of certitude is the common assent of mankind 
or of the competent by instruction among man- 
kind." In much the same strain writes Professor 
James : " Few of us are not infirm or even diseased, 
and our infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the 
psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality 
which is the sine qua non of the moral perception ; 
we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis 
which are the essence of practical moral vigor ; and 
we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism, 
which carry one's interests beyond the surface of 
the sensible world. What, then, is more natural 
than that this temperament opens to regions of re- 
ligious truth, to corners of the universe which your 
robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever 
offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast 
and thanking heaven that it has not a single 
morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to 
hide forever from the self-satisfied possessor? If 
there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 205 

realm, it might well be that the neurotic tempera- 
ment would furnish the chief condition of the re- 
quisite receptivity." 

But we are not all geniuses. Most of us are so 
keyed as to be able to respond to the more ordinary 
experiences alone. I have called attention to these 
abnormal cases and the way in which we should 
regard them only for the reason that in emphasiz- 
ing the characteristics belonging to those which, by 
mutual consent, are regarded as furnishing a true 
basis of knowledge, the impression might be left 
that they are of no value whatever. This is not the 
case. Clearly, however, they must be regarded as 
standing in a class by themselves and must be 
judged in the light of what they are worth. Ac- 
cordingly, I do not include them among those ex- 
periences had by all men and which are universally 
regarded as trustworthy sources of knowledge. It 
is with the latter alone that we are concerned, for it 
is upon these that our actual knowledge of exist- 
ences must at last depend. Surely we have no 
other pathway to the attainment of such knowledge 
than the one offered through actual contact with 
objects themselves, for it is, as we have seen, upon 
such contact that all experimental knowledge rests. 



206 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

But when, as a result of such contact, the same ex- 
periences invariably follow, and these not in the 
private consciousness of a favored few, but in that 
of all, then the knowledge based upon experience 
rises to the height of absolute certainty. It was 
one of the axioms of Spinoza that an " idea was 
true when it corresponds with its object." And it 
is just the accuracy of this correspondence which 
experience, oft repeated in the history of the race, 
is able to confirm that puts the seal of verity on 
our experimental knowledge. 

Now that God actually impresses Himself on the 
consciousness is the testimony of religious souls 
everywhere. Just as through impressions of sense 
we perceive the realities which make up our 
physical environment, so through the inner sense 
the religious soul is made conscious of God. 
He knows that his consciousness is effected as 
really by God as it is by existences in the out- 
side world. For as man, being as to his body, 
included in nature is surrounded by a physical 
environment which is constantly acting on him 
and presenting itself to his consciousness, so man, 
as spirit, is surrounded by a spiritual environ- 
ment which is constantly acting on him and pre- 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. ZOJ 

senting itself in his consciousness. And this en- 
vironment the devout soul feels to be God. 

You will hardly expect me to enter into a dis- 
cussion of the problem as to how God affects the 
consciousness in religious experience. That is a 
psychological problem of its own, and does not 
properly belong to the present discussion. It is not 
the question as to how God can come into the con- 
sciousness of the religious soul. It is with the fact 
that He is actually present that we have to do. As 
to the way in which the sensibility is affected ex- 
perience has nothing to say. It confines its testi- 
mony to the much more important fact that the 
consciousness is so affected, and that it is affected 
in a way precisely analogous to that in which a 
person affects it. Wherever you find the religious 
soul he will bear testimony to this fact. He is ab- 
solutely certain about it ; he is as thoroughly con- 
vinced of it as he is of the existence of the sun, of 
the sky which bends over his head, or of the actual 
existence of a friend with whom he holds daily 
intercourse. He knows that he experiences God ; 
that his consciousness is as really affected by God 
as it is by those outward objects which impress 
themselves upon him through the medium of the 



:oS E NATUR1 D 

senses. So convinced is he of the fact, as that 
gladly yields to it the governance of his life, 
dies, if need be, in witness . % : its reality. 

■ ; -.:: is this experience trustworthy? Is ; .; of such 
a nature as to afford a reliable basis foi knowledge? 
Let as see how it fares with it when submitted to 
the three tests to which all those experiences upon 
which real knowledge is built must be submitted. 

Let as apply to it the first test : that of actual and 
complete contact with the object Le: me ren 

again that the specific content of the religions 
consciousness is that of a person and not a thing. 
Experience proves that we are affected by pers 
in a way entirely different From the way in which 
we are affected b; things We ic distinguish be- 
en the effect produced in our consciousness by 
ing like ourselves and that produced by material 
objects. Were this not the case, no one could dis- 
tinguish between material and spiritual realities : 
indee;.. we could never hope to know tilings as they 
are. It is just because one thing affects us in one 
. and another in another, that we are able to 
distinguish between things, and affirm of a particu- 
lar sensation that this, and not that, has produced it. 
If all objects affected us alike the world would be 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 200, 

robbed of its diversity, and a knowledge of partic- 
ular things would be impossible. Jevons, speaking 
of scientific certainty, says : " Whatever feeling 
is actually present to the mind is certainly known 
by the mind. If the sky is blue, I may be quite 
sure that I experience a sensation of blueness. 
What I do feel, I feel beyond a doubt." We have 
either to trust our consciousness and acknowledge 
that in it things are represented as they are, or 
abandon forever the hope of knowing the world 
about us. Accordingly, when in consciousness an 
effect is produced by a person, we distinguish it 
from all other effects, and affirm that a person alone 
could have produced it. 

Now, it is to just this consciousness that the re- 
ligious person testifies. He knows himself to be 
affected not as an object, but as a person alone could 
affect him, and affirms of the effect that it is pro- 
duced by contact with a personal God. He knows 
that the effect could not have produced itself. 
That it is not to be traced to his own thinking, but 
that it has been produced by a person through the 
medium of spiritual contact. 

But is this contact out of which religious ex- 
perience comes a real and complete contact with 
14 



2IO THE NATURE OF GOD. 

the object ? Does it so touch the reality as that 
nothing essential is left out ? I think we have but 
to suggest this question to find the answer. For no 
one will deny that we do know persons as we do 
not know things. We do know our fellows as we 
do not know even the most familiar objects about 
us. Nor is this knowledge which we have of per- 
sons a knowledge simply about them. It takes in 
the very inmost. It comprehends the elements 
which make up their very selves. 

Take, for instance, the knowledge which you have 
of a tree or a stone, or of a material object. You 
have but to sift it to find out that, at best, it is but 
a knowledge of attributes, of those qualities which 
belong to it. The thing itself, the ultimate reality, 
escapes you, for the reason that no faculty of the 
sense is sufficiently delicate to put you in touch 
with the thing in which these qualities inhere. 
What, at last, do we know of matter, in spite of all 
these centuries of study and investigation? We 
know some of its belongings ; we know its more 
common modes of manifestation, and in some degree 
the laws which govern it. But, like the will-o'-the- 
wisp, matter itself has eluded our quest and van- 
ished into the darkness whenever we have attempted 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 211 

a near approach. It escapes contact, and escaping 
this, has not yet become an object of complete 
knowledge. It is the same with force. We know 
its push or pull, its modes of manifestation, but the 
thing itself has stood aloof for the reason that no 
avenue has yet been discovered through which the 
thing itself might be made to affect the conscious- 
ness. And thus, in cases without number, our in- 
ability to put ourselves into that actual contact with 
the object which experience requires, shuts the door 
of knowledge in our faces and leaves us in darkness 
as to what these things are in themselves. 

But it is not so in respect of our knowledge of 
persons. We do know ourselves, and knowing our- 
selves we are able to know others like us, for it is 
given to the spirit to know best that which is most 
like itself. The contact of spirit with spirit in its 
intimacy is such as can never be approached in the 
case of material objects through the sense. In all 
our personal relations the contact is from both 
sides ; a contact in which each fits, as it were, into 
the other. In all our personal relations we not only 
seek to touch others, but others seek also to touch 
us. It is not so with material objects. The stone, 
the tree, the flower, the sky, the hills, make no re- 



212 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

sponse. We may seek to commune with them, but 
they remain silent. Our joys, our sorrows, evoke 
no response, and in spite of our imagination, in all 
that pertains to their innermost, we are miles and 
miles apart even at the points where contact seems 
to be the most intimate. But we do touch persons. 
Through speech, through sympathy, through love, 
through that mysterious something in us which 
communes with what is kindred to it, and in turn 
unlocks the innermost of another, we do know even 
as we are known. It cannot be denied that we do 
know more of persons than we do of things. And 
we do so for the reason that our contact with per- 
sons is vastly more complete than it can possibly 
be with soulless and irresponsive objects. 

So far, then, it appears that the knowledge based 
on religious experience is absolutely trustworthy. 
It rests on experience produced by actual contact 
with a person. It has its basis in facts given in the 
consciousness through real and intimate contact 
with its object — a contact vastly more intimate and 
real than any which can be had with material objects 
through the medium of the sense. 

Let us now apply the second test of trustworthi- 
ness to religious knowledge. We agreed, a moment 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 21 3 

ago, that certainty in respect of any particular item 
of knowledge gained through experiment increased 
with each repetition of the experiment in which a 
like result was produced. We are never quite sure 
of the truth of any proposition which has for its 
basis a single experience. At best, we hold such 
propositions only tentatively. We say they may be 
true, or they may not be true. But if any such 
proposition is confirmed by repeated experiments, 
and if these always result in precisely the same way, 
then what was before a mere hypothesis becomes an 
established fact in science. We are absolutely cer- 
tain of any proposition which has its confirmation 
in multiplied and unvarying experiment. The 
facts of science ; the laws which govern in the realm 
of nature, in short, all facts universally accepted are 
of this sort, and we accept them for the sole reason 
that they are. 

But do the great facts to which religious experi- 
ence testifies rest upon this same basis ? And does 
this experience, however often repeated, confirm 
the claim that in his daily communion the religious 
soul has actually to do with a person ? Let us deal 
honestly with the question. A fact witnessed and 
confirmed by multiplied experiences is no less a fact 



214 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

because it happens to be religious. The conscious- 
ness to which God is present is the same conscious- 
ness as that in which realities of the outward world 
present themselves. The individual to whom both 
experiences come and in whose consciousness both 
impressions are made is the same. If, then, a fact 
confirmed by numerous experiments is absolutely 
certain in the one case, is it not also in the other ? 
For let it not be forgotten that the experience of 
the pious soul, no matter how often repeated, is 
precisely the same. It always testifies to the fact 
that it is a person, and not a thing, by which the 
consciousness is affected, and that this person is no 
other than God. 

Nor are these experiences isolated or even occa- 
sional. Enoch daily walks with God ; and the 
Psalmist prevents the dawn in the sweet fellowship 
of prayer. In fact, the moments when God is not 
experienced and when He is not felt to be in the 
consciousness are exceptional, and are sure to be 
mourned. Let us own that if the experiences 
of which we are speaking were variable, or even 
occasional, then the conclusion that they are pro- 
duced by a person would be less certain. It is their 
constancy, along with the fact that they invariably 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 215 

witness to the same thing, which gives them their 
weight and imparts certainty to the knowledge 
which rests upon them as a basis. 

But we must hasten to the application of the 
third test, that of universality. Are these experi- 
ences upon which religious knowledge rests such 
as may be had by all men ? 

Now, in answering this question, let it be under- 
stood that we have in mind only experiences of per- 
sonal fellowship, the consciousness of communion 
with a personal being, which, as we have seen, is the 
essential thing in all religious experience. Aside 
from this particular element there will be others 
peculiar to each individual. For in this, as in all 
other experiences resulting from contact with real- 
ities, there will be minor effects determined by 
individual temperament and differences in mental 
constitution. I speak of what comes to all. Of 
that which is so distinctly of the essence of religious 
experience as that when it is not present, something 
vital is left out. Do all saintly souls testify to the 
consciousness that God is personal and that He 
sustains to them relations identical with those 
which exist between themselves and an earthly 
friend ? Is this experience universal ? 



2l6 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

Let us except those spiritual geniuses who by 
common consent are lifted above the laws which 
hold in respect of ordinary men and women. They 
stand in a class by themselves, possessed as they are 
of that peculiar physical and mental constitution 
which makes them responsive to experiences which 
in the nature of the case can be had by them alone. 
Yet no one will dispute that the knowledge with 
which even these abnormal souls have enriched the 
world has for the most part been trustworthy in 
spite of the fact that it rests on experiences which 
were theirs alone. We do accept the knowledge so 
derived, for the reason that it has proven itself to 
be trustworthy. Yet we do not accept it for the 
reason that it is private, but in spite of its privacy. 
We accept it on the ground of the moral trust- 
worthiness of those who testify to the experiences, 
and also on account of its real value to the world. 

But, barring these exceptions, what we require 
as a guarantee of certainty of all knowledge of ex- 
istences external to us is, that the experience grow- 
ing out of contact with them shall be such as may 
be had by all alike. We distrust privacy. We have 
every reason to trust the universal. 

Well, then, does religious experience universally 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 217 

witness to the fact, that in religion communion is 
had with a personal being ? We have but to open 
history to find the answer. Indeed, the reality of 
such communion is the one distinguishing feature 
of the religious consciousness. It is the mutuality 
of this very experience that unites the hearts of 
every race and of every temperament into a spirit- 
ual community. It is just this which is common 
to the experience of all alike, whether learned or 
unlearned, black or white, peasant or philosopher. 
For, where has religion not lived ? What earthly 
condition or environment has shut it out ? What 
race or people is there among which it has not 
found a home? What surroundings from those 
under which men have been compelled to toil for 
their daily bread, to those which make the envir- 
onment of the favored whose privilege it is to 
live in ivory palaces, have kept men aloof from 
that companionship with God which is the essence 
of religion ? At last, the hunger of the soul and its 
willingness to yield itself in full surrender to the 
One for whom it feels itself to have been created, 
are all that is needed to produce the experiences 
upon which religious knowledge rests. 

And, thus, when fairly regarded, religious knowl- 



2l8 THE NATURE OE GOD. 

edge is verified by every possible test of certainty. 
It claims no exception. It seeks not to avoid the 
rigid processes to which we submit our other knowl- 
edge. Its facts, like those of science, rest on actual 
contact with the object and are verified by experi- 
ments without number and by individuals every- 
where. From this it follows, that it is not a guess 
which religion makes when it affirms of God that 
He is a personal being. It is knowledge, tested and 
scientifically verified. 

But we must not turn away until we have made 
•reply to a question which is certain to be asked by 
the confirmed skeptic. It is the one which grows 
out of the so-called privacy of religious experience. 
For, since it is actually had by some alone, and not 
by all indiscriminately, it will be asked, does not 
this fact throw suspicion on that knowledge which 
rests on religious experience as its basis? In reply 
to this question let me ask another. Is religious 
knowledge, then, an exception, or is it not, on the 
contrary, true that all knowledge based on experi- 
ence is in a certain degree private ? The truth is, 
that all experimental knowledge is essentially such, 
and is the possession of those alone who have had 
the experience. The knowledge of the astronomer 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 2 1 9 

is private. To him alone the heavens speak their 
secrets and make known the laws of their being. 
To him alone, they are peopled with worlds, pro- 
jecting themselves along the track of their orbits, 
and to the music of the spheres his ears alone are 
open. But this knowledge need not be private. 
It is open to all who are willing to tread the path- 
way which leads through the portals of astronomic 
knowledge. The knowledge of the chemist is his 
alone. No eye but his has witnessed the strange 
behavior of the substances with which he deals, 
and with which he has made himself familiar. But 
it need not be private. To all who are willing to 
submit to her requirements, nature opens her sanc- 
tuary and unfolds the secrets of her mysterious 
processes. But a man may shut himself out from 
any kind of knowledge. He may wait and demand 
that it come to him in his own way. But he will 
remain the fool that he was, for knowledge comes 
alone to those who open themselves to her, and who 
are willing to enter through the door of experience, 
which she throws open to all. Her promise to all 
who really want to know is, " They that seek me 
shall find me, and to him that knocketh it shall be 
opened." I know of no branch of knowledge from 



220 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

which, if a man chooses, he may not shut himself 
out. But that fact does not invalidate the knowl- 
edge, or make it a whit less certain. The question 
is not whether the experience upon which any kind 
of knowledge rests has been had by all, but whether 
it may be had by all. 

I have been told that in the great tunnels which 
pierce the coal deposits of Durham, in England, 
down in the darkness, into which no ray of sun- 
light has ever penetrated, there live men and women 
who have never seen the sunlight. Men to whom 
the experiences which fill the soul at early dawn or at 
the falling of the evening shadows have never come. 
Men whose only conception of the glory of the light 
is molded by the flickering lamps which open for 
them a pathway through the gloomy passageways. 
And such may, indeed, dispute, upon the grounds 
of privacy, the experiences had by those to whom 
the light is no stranger. Such may suspect the 
knowledge of terrestrial things which comes to 
men who live and walk in the day. But what sane 
one would accept the plea ? The experience of the 
sunlight may, indeed, be private, it may not have 
been shared by all men. But it is had by all who 
have not themselves shut out the light. 



THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 221 

And so, likewise, is it with the experiences which 
come to the religious soul. They are such as may 
be had by all. They are such as do come to all 
who conform with the conditions, viz., the com- 
plete surrender of self to the loving and all-wise 
control of the One who has said, " If any man 
open the door, I will come in and sup with him, 
and he with me," — the One whose challenge to the 
unbeliever is contained in the words, " If any man 
wills to do the will of my Father in heaven, he 
shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God or 
whether I speak of myself." 



LECTURE SIXTH. 

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 

A religious conception of God is of necessity an- 
thropomorphic. Since the essence of religion is 
actual communion with the Deity, its idea of God 
must needs be that of a personal being. Between 
the human spirit and that which is not like itself, 
there can be no fellowship. That mutual under- 
standing which is the outcome of kinship is indis- 
pensable to real fellowship. 

And so it has come that by the religious soul God 
has always been conceived as personal ; a being more 
like ourselves than anything of which we can think. 
To all such He is a person ; lifted, indeed, above all 
human imperfections, possessed of perfect self-con- 
sciousness and self-control, yet a Being capable 
of being touched with a "feeling of our infirmi- 
ties " for the reason that in nature He is one with 
us. It is alone in the soil of such a conception 
of God that religion lives and finds all that is essen- 
tial to its life. Apart from it, it withers and dies. 

Whatever prejudices we may have against anthropo- 

(222) 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 223 

morphic thoughts of the Deity, it is, nevertheless, 
certain that they are inseparable from religion. Pan- 
theism, in which the Deity is conceived as impersonal 
substance, is no religion. At best Pantheism is but 
a philosophy. It may be acknowledged that in the 
beginning its founder, Spinoza, was influenced by 
religious motives. Yet it cannot be denied that in 
the end he sacrificed the religious to the speculative 
interest. He gave to the world a system of philoso- 
phy which imprisons the Deity in a universe from 
which he cannot escape, and robs him of self-con- 
sciousness, except as he arrives at it in man. 
Accordingly Pantheism has always been inimical 
to religion. It affords no ground for fellowship be- 
tween man and God, and borrows from Theism 
the moment it admits its possibility. Nor has 
Deism, with its far-away God, a God too great 
to concern Himself with our affairs, or even 
with us, a place for communion. Across infinite 
wastes the soul must cry in vain, for out of the 
limitless distance no voice can answer or help come. 
Materialism, with its impersonal and unconscious 
Deity, is also barren of all that can give life to re- 
ligion. It demands a personal God, a God conceived 
in terms of the human spirit to bring it into being. 



224 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

But we must not fall into the error of supposing 
that religion stands alone in this particular. Sci- 
ence, history and philosophy are under the same 
necessity. It would seem that the mind, whether 
seeking to discover the secrets of nature or to solve 
the mysteries of existence, must of necessity move 
along anthropomorphic channels. Except as re- 
garded in the light of one or another of our human 
attributes the world about us has no meaning. The 
charm of the knowledge of nature is the discovery 
therein of reason and order corresponding to our 
own ideas of reason and order. Remove from phi- 
losophy its anthropomorphisms in speech and con- 
ception and you take from it the only element that 
makes it intelligible. From the " Ideas " of Plato 
to the " cosmical processes " of Hegel, and then 
on to the " Unconscious Will " of Schopenhauer, 
psychological anthropomorphisms characterize 
every system of philosophy. It cannot escape 
them. In fact, every definition or conception of an 
Ultimate must, so far as it is not a pure negation, 
suggest either a being human in respect of the high- 
est attributes of humanity, or borrow its terms from 
that class of expressions which express human attri- 
butes and functions. 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 225 

There are but three forms, says Martineau, 
" under which it is possible to think of the ulti- 
mate or immanent principle of the universe. Mind, 
life, matter. Given the first, it is intellectually 
thought out ; the second, it blindly grows ; the 
third, it mechanically shuffles into equilibrium. 
From what school do we draw these types of con- 
ception ? Is it not from our home experience ? If 
it is because we are rational that we see reason 
around us, no less is it because we are alive that 
we believe in the living ; and it is because we have 
to deal with our own weight and extension that we 
make acquaintance with material things. Take 
away the properties of the " ego " and we should 
never find what they are in the "non ego." Man 
is equally your point of departure, whether you 
discern in the cosmos an intellectual, a physiolog- 
ical or a mechanical system ; and the only question 
is, whether you construe it by its highest character- 
istics, or by the middle attributes which it shares 
with other organisms, or by the lowest that are 
absent from no physical thing. In every doctrine, 
therefore, it is from our microcosm that we have to 
interpret the macrocosm ; and from* the type of our 

humanity as presented in self-knowledge there is 
15 



226 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

• 

no more escape for the Pantheist or the Materialist 
than for the Theist. Modify them as you will, all 
causal conceptions are born from within as reflec- 
tions or reductions of our personal, animal or phys- 
ical activity ; and the severest science is in this 
sense just as anthropomorphic as the most ideal 
theology." 

The same may be said of histoiy. Except as its 
events are united in the anthropomorphic idea of 
purpose, they remain but a tangled mass of facts, 
without relation and without meaning. Nor are 
these anthropomorphisms so characteristic of our 
sober literature, the result, as some would have us 
believe, of poverty of speech. Verbal expression 
always keeps pace with changing conceptions, and 
vocabularies have always been enriched when the 
occasion has demanded it. It is because anthropo- 
morphism lies at the core of things ; because mind 
and will and purpose are actually in the world, that 
a correct expression of the facts just as they are be- 
comes, of necessity, anthropomorphic. Until sci- 
ence and philosophy are able to construe the world 
as it is without the use of terms borrowed from our 
spiritual natures, religion needs no apologist and may 
retort to the objector, " Physician, heal thyself." 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 227 

Nevertheless, it will be worth our while to look 
into a few of the more pretentious of these objec- 
tions to religious anthropomorphisms in order that 
we may be able to see just what they are worth. 

It will not be denied that a religious conception 
of God is essentially anthropomorphic. To the de- 
vout soul, God is conceived, not in terms of matter 
or in those of substance, but in terms of the human 
spirit. To all such He is a thinking, feeling, will- 
ing God ; possessed of human qualities and attri- 
butes, a being moved by love, by compassion and 
anger, ordering and superintending the means for 
the accomplishment of some prearranged purpose. 
In a word, a Deity, human at the very moment that 
He is divine, and for this reason able to sympathize 
as well as to help. And as such He is represented 
in that book which, more than any other, has given 
shape to the religious conceptions of men and given 
to thought its only vital conceptions of the Deity ; 
I mean the Bible. It will not be disputed that the 
presentations which the Scripture gives us of God 
are decidedly anthropomorphic. It represents Him 
as a being possessed of eyes to behold the righteous, 
of ears to listen to their prayers, to whom the smell 
of incense and the savor of sacrifice is sweet. One 



228 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

who, on account of His nature, is capable of shar- 
ing all the struggles and travails of humanity, of 
feeling the extremity of human anguish and moved 
by human emotions. A being who, because of His 
human likeness, is able to commune with man face 
to face ; in the fullness of time to become incarnate, 
to live, suffer, die and arise from the dead, and 
ascend into heaven bearing our human nature with 
Him. There is no denying the fact that it is the 
humanity of the Deity to which the Bible gives 
prominence, or that it is a quasi-human God for 
whom it makes the claim that He was " the bright- 
ness of the Father's glory and the express image of 
His person." Yet it is against all such thoughts of 
the Deity that we are cautioned by a few who have 
assumed to themselves the task of protecting His 
dignity against profane encroachment. By these it 
is objected : 

First, that to affirm that God is a person is to 
vest Him with limitations. They remind us of 
the fact that whatever the Deity may or may not 
be, He is at least the absolutely unlimited and 
unconditioned. But personality, or what is the 
same, self-consciousness, is, in the nature of the 
case, conditioned. It requires the aid of some sub- 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 229 

stantial reality apart from itself to bring it into 
being, since without the help of such reality no one 
can possibly know himself as personal. Accord- 
ingly, God cannot be a person, for the reason that 
to be such is of necessity to be dependent. 

You will at once perceive that this objection is 
purely psychological. It is one that would never 
occur to the every-day thinker, for the reason that 
it requires an acquaintance with metaphysical 
terms and methods to give it meaning. Neverthe- 
less, let us do what we can to divest it of its meta- 
physical harshness in order that we may the better 
estimate its real force. 

It starts with the assumption that we are personal, 
self-conscious beings ; that we know ourselves as hav- 
ing an existence distinct and apart from external ob- 
jects. But how came we to know ourselves as sepa- 
rate and through this discovery to arrive at self-con- 
sciousness ? From the standpoint of the objector we 
are not so at the beginning. Nor is the fact of our 
personality intuitively perceived. It is something 
that needs to be developed, something that requires 
the existence of something apart from itself to make 
it real. To arrive at self-consciousness, we require 
something with which we may contrast ourselves 



230 THE NATURK OF GOD. 

and from which we may distinguish ourselves. Be- 
fore it is possible for the thinking subject to affirm 
of anything " that is not me " and " I am not 
that," some reality must needs exist apart from it. 
We look out for illustration on a world made up of 
objective realities ; of rocks and trees and mount- 
ains, and in so doing make the discovery that they 
are not ourselves. We contrast ourselves with 
them, perceive that they are to be distinguished 
from ourselves and we from them. Now, it is held 
that out of such contrast self-consciousness is awak- 
ened. That this ability whereby we are able to 
distinguish between self and not self and which is 
the vital thing in self-consciousness could not be 
realized in the absence of these external realities 
which make such contrast possible. Take away all 
outward reality and no one could possibly know 
himself as personal or be conscious of his existence 
apart from them. Personality is contingent and 
dependent, arising, as it does, out of the contrast 
which the mind makes between the outward object 
and the thinking subject ; it demands external 
objects to make it real. 

Well, now, if this be true, then the objector is 
right in his contention that God cannot be personal, 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 23 1 

for the reason that if He is, He is of necessity de- 
pendent. But a dependent God is unthinkable. In 
all that pertains to His being or attributes He is, in 
the nature of the case, self-existent and uncon- 
ditioned. 

Such, then, as briefly as I can state it, is the sub- 
stance of the first objection to the Divine personal- 
ity as held by religion. And if we admit that self- 
consciousness is thus conditioned and that the proc- 
ess by which we arrive at it is such as has been 
described, then we are certainly face to face with a 
most formidable objection. If personality actually 
involves dependence, then whatever our notions of 
God may be, we must, at least, eliminate from them 
all that savors of the personal. 

But is it a fact that we do arrive at self-conscious- 
ness in the way described, and is it true that, apart 
from objective existences with which we may con- 
trast ourselves, we are unable to know ourselves as 
persons ? It may be seriously doubted whether any- 
one has ever arrived at self-consciousness in that 
way. It is true, that after we once recognize our- 
selves as personal, we look upon outward realities 
and contrast ourselves with them. But we do not 
arrive at the fact of our separate existence in that 



232 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

way. The process is vastly more simple than this 
of endless comparison and separation of self from 
the not self. For how, let us ask, is it possible for 
that which at the beginning of the process does not 
already recognize itself as distinct to distinguish 
itself from that which is not itself? In every process 
we must begin somewhere. We must separate this 
from that. We must begin the process with dis- 
tinctions already in mind. Were it not for the fact 
that we already know ourselves as distinct we could 
not even begin the task of comparison. It is just 
because we already know ourselves as persons, and 
are conscious that we are looking on outward things, 
that we are able to distinguish ourselves from them. 
When Descartes uttered his great saying, " I think, 
therefore I am," he indicated the real origin of self- 
consciousness, and dispelled the delusion that it is 
in any sense dependent on the existence of realities 
outside of us. To think is to be conscious that we 
are thinking. To think of things is to know our- 
selves as distinct from them. In fact, the moment 
that thought is born self-consciousness is also born. 
You may shut man off entirely from the outward 
world, close every avenue of sense-perception, leave 
him nothing but the power to think, and he will 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 233 

know himself as personal. Lotze, long ago pointed 
ont the unsoundness of the position that the " I " 
can only be real in opposition to the " not I " when 
he said, " It is a common error to suppose that two 
things, because their conceptions are correlative, 
and form the terms of an opposition or relation, have 
arisen in and through this relation itself." It is so, 
with the distinction between the " I " and the " not 
I." These terms do not arise merely in their con- 
trast, but each of them was whatever it is before ever 
the contrast was made, and was so in spite of the 
circumstance that in this case the one of these con- 
ceptions is only indicated by the verbal negation of 
the other. Indeed, that which constitutes the es- 
sence of the " I " previous to the contrast, is itself 
the ground on account of which in the contrast it 
presents itself only as the "I," and not as the 
"not I." 

But let it even be owned that we need the help 
of something from which to distinguish ourselves 
in order that self-consciousness may be awak- 
ened, it by no means follows that this something 
must be a reality apart from ourselves. That im- 
portant something is found in thought itself ; for 
to think is to discover that our thoughts are dis- 



234 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

tinct from the being who thinks them. For is it 
not true that the very first result of our thinking is 
that of distinguishing between ourselves and our 
own thoughts and states ? Or does anyone at the 
moment that he gives himself to reflection fail to 
distinguish between himself and the thoughts 
which he thinks ? Surely, if something other than 
the thinking self is necessary to the awakening of 
self-consciousness, that something is presented in 
the thoughts we think, and which we at once rec- 
ognize as being distinct from ourselves. A spirit 
has personality, or rather is a person, the moment 
it knows itself as unitary subject in opposition to 
its own states and to its own ideas ; these states and 
ideas it recognizes itself as uniting in itself as the 
subject of them, while they are only dependent 
states in it. And so, the attempt to make out that 
to know one's self as a person is in any way de- 
pendent on the existence of a substantial not self, 
ends in failure. It requires nothing more than the 
ability of the subject to grasp its own states and 
thoughts as its own. We may even grant that our 
consciousness begins and is conditioned by the ac- 
tivity of something not ourselves ; still it does not 
lie in the notion of consciousness that it must be 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 235 

aroused from without, or that it is dependent on 
the existence of an external world. 

And so to the objector's question, What is the 
object of the Deity's consciousness, we reply, His 
own thoughts and states. If it be asked, When did 
this self-consciousness begin, we answer, Never. 
To the further question, On what does it depend ? 
we reply, On His own power to know. An eternal 
unbegun self is as possible as an eternal unbegun 
not self ; an eternal consciousness is no more diffi- 
cult than eternal unconsciousness. And so it ap- 
pears that we have but to examine candidly this 
objection to the Divine personality to discover its 
weakness. In common with all philosophical ob- 
jections to the theistic conception of the Deity, it 
rests on a defective and very superficial psychology. 
Indeed, it is hard to persuade one's self that it was 
ever meant to be taken seriously. 

But its weakness is further manifest, in the fact 
that it rests wholly and entirely upon an unwar- 
ranted assumption. I mean the assumption that 
the limitations that beset our human consciousness 
are essential to consciousness itself. L,et us own 
that personality, as we know it in ourselves, is 
limited. It is. But is this fact a sufficient warrant 



236 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

for the conclusion that limitations belong essen- 
tially to personality, or that they are inherent in 
consciousness itself? Is it not, on the contrary, 
true that these very limitations are foreign rather 
than native to it ? Take them one by one ; ex- 
amine each separately, and they will all be found 
to attach to the impersonal in us rather than to the 
personal. They are each and all foreign to the 
spirit rather than essential belongings of it. And 
as such the spirit regards them. It looks upon 
them as hindrances from which it must escape, in 
order that it may enter on that life of freedom 
which is its by right. It regards them as intruders, 
and as alien to its true nature. It knows that its 
outreaching for God and for perfect freedom are but 
attempts! to realize a more perfect personality. It 
is just this consciousness of the impersonal in us, 
from which the soul is ever seeking to escape, along 
with the ever-recurring foregleams of that perfect 
freedom which is to be its own when complete per- 
sonality is attained, that keeps alive the struggle 
for moral character and life. In other words, it is 
the struggle of the spirit to attain a perfect person- 
ality and to realize that freedom which is its by 
right, that lies at the bottom of every moral struggle 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 237 

in which we are engaged. We are neither perfectly- 
self-conscious nor self-controlled. We know but in 
part, and we prophesy but in part. But we also 
know that when that which is perfect is come then 
that which is in part shall be done away. Did 
these limitations belong essentially to our person- 
alities, we would not be conscious of them. It is 
the recognition of their alien character, and the cer- 
tainty that they do not belong to personality in its 
perfection that accounts for the fact that we not 
only perceive them but also struggle to throw 
them off. 

And this is the profound meaning of the 
words of Jesus, "I am come that they might 
have life, and that they might have it more 
abundantly." " Whosoever shall lose his life for 
my sake shall find it." Just in the measure that 
the spirit disengages itself from the earthly and 
the impersonal does it take on its true life, for the 
outcome of such elimination is always the perfect- 
ing of the personality. It is because Jesus is free, 
and on that account the perfect person, that man- 
kind looks to Him as its ideal, and is smitten with 
the consciousness that until it becomes like Him its 
true selfhood must remain unrealized. It is this 



238 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

foreign element in us, this something which does not 
belong to us ideally, that makes our personality in- 
complete, and keeps alive the longing and the 
struggle to be like God. If these limitations of 
which we are conscious entered into the essence of 
personality, and if they did not disappear just in 
the measure that perfect personality is realized, 
then we would be warranted in the conclusion that 
God cannot be a person. But since such is not the 
case, and since, on the contrary, these limitations 
disappear as we pass from the impersonal into the 
personal, the objection is left without foundation. 
To the perfect person, they are entirely foreign ; 
they are not a part of his consciousness for the 
reason that such a one is in the nature of the case 
entirely free. 

But we must not think that we have disposed 
of all objections to an anthropomorphic conception 
of the Deity when we have made reply to those 
which philosophy offers to it. Objections come 
also from the religious side and in the supposed in- 
terests of religion itself. The highway that leads 
from Sinai to Bethlehem is long, but it is one upon 
which the light of revelation shines brighter and 
brighter unto the perfect day. Beginning with a 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 239 

Deity hidden behind clouds, from the midst of 
which a voice spake, saying, " Take heed to your- 
selves that ye go not up into the mount or touch the 
border of it," it ends in His full disclosure in the 
person of the One who said, " He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father." 

Nevertheless, there are some even among re- 
ligious people who prefer to linger at the mount. 
Their notions of God are satisfied rather by its light- 
nings and clouds and thunder, its voice of warning 
against nearness of approach, than by the sim- 
ple and unostentatious events of the incarnation or 
His life lived before the eyes of men. To such 
those metaphysical attributes which suggest His 
almightiness and aloofness will be preferable to 
those more human ones which He shares with us 
and the possession of which makes it possible for 
Him to be our daily companion and friend. Well, 
when such notions of God are thought to be essen- 
tial to religion, it is little wonder that those who 
hold them should take alarm at all anthropomorph- 
isms in thought or speech. For how is a being, 
whose nature is in any sense like our own, to be 
thought of as Deity? Or how is a God, whose 
dignity is thus compromised, to inspire within the 



240 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

soul of man those emotions of awe and fear upon 
which it is supposed that religion is dependent? 
Now, if it be a fact that such notions of God are 
vital to religion, then this objection to anthropo- 
morphism is, in all conscience, serious enough. 
But is religion thus dependent ? Does it require a 
Deity, whose garments are darkness and thick 
clouds of the skies, One who speaks in thunders 
and whose presence inspires terror to keep it alive ? 
Is mere physical almightiness more to be had in 
reverence than that spiritual excellence which goes 
out in loving companionship with the weak? 
Was Judaism at last right when it spurned the 
claims of Jesus and taught that God was too great 
to become incarnate in human flesh ? I think that 
just the contrary is the case. In fact, it is not until 
aloofness gives place to nearness and fear yields its 
place to love that religion takes its rise in the soul. 
Its essence is communion and fellowship with the 
Deity, relations that are utterly impossible so long 
as fear is in possession of the heart. " He that lov- 
eth me," said Jesus, "shall be loved of my Father, 
and I will love him and will manifest myself to 
him." And it is the greatest of the apostles who 
reminds us that " perfect love casteth out fear." It 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 24.I 

was that He might be known, and by being known 
also loved, that He became incarnate. It was that 
He might be loved, that by His incarnation He 
proved His kinship with us. To be sure, if God is 
for us, to be the supreme One, our notions of Him 
must be exalted. By no thought or figure of 
speech may the exalted nature of God be compro- 
mised. We must make of Him no graven image or 
any likeness inconsistent with His worthiness. To 
think unworthily of God is to evaporate His deity, 
and even to take His name in vain is to degrade 
Him to the level of the commonplace. Neverthe- 
less, if we think of Him at all, we must think of 
Him in some particular way. If the mind in the 
moment that it turns itself Godward is not to re- 
main in utter vacuity, it must occupy itself with 
some particular content, the material of which has 
been given in experience. The thought of the in- 
determinate is the thought of nothing. Accord- 
ingly, it is not a question as to whether or not we 
shall liken God to anything, but rather as to what 
we shall liken Him without compromising His su- 
preme spiritual excellence. It is in the fact that at 
last all knowledge must rest on experience, and 

that experience makes us acquainted with nothing 
16 



242 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

higher than a spirit made in the divine image, that 
anthropomorphism finds its vindication. 

But is it true that to think of God as personal, 
or, what is the same, in terms of our human nature, 
tends to the lessening of that sense of His majesty 
and holiness which, in the interest of religion, must 
needs be fostered in the soul ? L,et it be remem- 
bered that this is not a question that is to be de- 
cided by the advocates of any particular theory or 
in the light of foregone conclusions as to what we 
must or must not expect. It is one to which ex- 
perience alone can make answer. But when we 
turn to experience, we find that whenever God has 
been thought of as impersonal, or even as quasi- 
personal, reverence and veneration have vanished, 
and that, on the contrary, both of these emotions 
have been intensified just in the measure that the 
fact of His personality and likeness to ourselves has 
taken possession of the thoughts of men. For 
where has a sense of His exalted majesty been so 
pronounced as just among those who have looked 
upon Him as profoundly personal ? To whose soul 
has there come so overwhelming a sense of His un- 
speakable holiness as that which came to Jacob, to 
Job, to David, to Paul, to Augustine, to Luther, and 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 243 

to the innumerable company of men and women 
whose saintliness has glorified the history of man- 
kind ? Did any of these lack in a sense of reverence, 
or did any of these think lightly of the Deity ? It was 
Jacob, to whom God had made Himself known as a 
person, who was " afraid," and who, speaking even 
of the place where God had met Him, said, " How 
holy is this place ; this is none other than the house 
of God." It is David to whom God is profoundly 
personal, who, addressing the Almighty, says, u O 
Lord my God, Thou art very great ; Thou art 
clothed with honor and majesty? Who cover- 
est Thyself with light as with a garment ; who 
stretchest out the heavens like a curtain. Who 
layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters, 
who maketh the clouds His chariot, who walketh 
upon the wings of the wind. Who maketh His 
angels spirits, His ministers a flaming fire." Or 
was Job wanting in reverence for the One with 
whom he communed and whose presence con- 
strained him to say, " Behold, I am vile. What 
shall I answer Thee ? I will lay my hand upon my 
mouth." 

But why should I dwell ? One has but to read 
the literature of religion to dispel all doubt that he 



244 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

may have as to the effect that a conception of God 
as personal may have in lessening a sense of His 
majesty or of the immeasurable distance by which, 
in character He is separated from us. Indeed, it is 
in the presence of such conceptions of God that 
reverence reaches its height and worship is made 
possible. You will look in vain for either in the 
literature or life of heathenism with its impersonal 
gods. You will find neither reverence nor godly 
fear among the devotees of any of those systems of 
philosophy in which the personality of God is 
denied, or even called in question. In fact, these 
very attributes which tell of the holiness and moral 
excellence of God and which inspire worship attach 
alone to a personal being. They belong alone to 
the One of whom it may be declared that He is both 
self-conscious and self-controlled. 

Nor does the thought of God as personal, or even 
as one whose nature is like our own, open the way 
to undue familiarity with Him. It is true that it 
brings God nearer to us. It is true that it makes it 
possible for Him to be our friend and companion, 
for only as He is personal can He be known or 
loved. But it is His transcendent excellence that 
always stands in the way of undue familiarity and 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 245 

that keeps alive the sense of the immense moral 
distance existing between Him and us. A Being 
supremely worthy does not need to be protected by 
artificial decorations or metaphysical attributes. 
He needs not to be kept aloof that He may be pre- 
served against irreverent intrusion. On the con- 
trary, the better such a One is known, the nearer 
His approach, the more perfect will be the rever- 
ence evoked. 

Experience proves that those who have known 
the most of God, those to whom He has been a 
daily companion, have also possessed the pro- 
foundest sense of their own littleness as compared 
with His majesty. It is not by the segregation of 
the Deity, not by relegating Him to a position of 
utter remoteness that reverence and Godly fear are 
to be kept alive. Reverence for the truly worthy 
is always the product of intimate knowledge. It 
is not familiarity with the Highest that breeds con- 
tempt. Irreverence, on the contrary, is always the 
progeny of false conceptions, perversions, obscura- 
tions — in a word, ignorance of God. You have 
only to remove Him beyond the range of our 
knowledge, to push Him into the dark background 



246 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

of the unknowable to destroy reverence and en- 
gender contempt. 

And this has invariably been the effect of those 
lofty epithets which philosophy has applied to the 
Deity. They have served but to remove Him from 
the realm of the concrete into that of the abstract. 
They do not belong to the living God. They are 
certain to have the effect of separating Him from 
us and of negativing all definition. Practically, 
they all amount to a denial of knowledge, and serve 
but to render a conception of God vague and unreal 
to the mind. Such a Deity is at best but a name- 
less specter, hovering in mists and shadows ; a some- 
thing the nature of which it is impossible to dis- 
cover, and devoid of vitality sufficient to awaken 
our respect. Tell men that God is the personal 
spirit and the term carries with it a definite con- 
ception. And to affirm, not that He is a spirit, but 
the personal spirit, is to tell all that we know or can 
know of Him. I do not say that it tells all that He 
is ; but it tells who He is, and gives us the assur- 
ance that He feels and thinks and wills as do we. 
In the interest of religion we must by all means 
hold to the term personal in our definition of the 
Deity. Every other term but obscures His real 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 247 

nature, confuses our conception, and leaves us with- 
out a God real enough to awaken our concern. 

And it is just this conception of a personal Deity, 
or, if you please, of a quasi-human God, to which 
warrant is given in the words and life of the One 
in whom from the day of His death until now the 
thought of the world has found its highest expres- 
sion of the Deity. I think it is the deepest and the 
truest thing that we can say of Jesus, that He fills out 
in full the anthropomorphic measure of our human 
way of thinking about God. It is precisely this 
conception that constitutes the loftiest tenet of the 
religion which He founded ; a religion which for 
thousands of years has withstood the keenest criti- 
cism of the ages and commanded the whole-hearted 
assent of the brightest intellects the world has ever 
known. 

But what, let us now ask, is a person? What 
idea of the divine being is present to the religious 
soul when he applies the term personal to God? 
I think that any doubt as to the appropriateness of 
the term will be dispelled when this question is 
correctly answered. What, then, is a person ? Con- 
fessedly we have here a most difficult question. 
Not that we do not know of what we are speaking 



248 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

when we use the term person. We do. It is the 
one thing that we know best in the world, and it is 
also the most mysterious thing that we know. We 
know others, and we also know ourselves. That 
little pronoun "I" is a term most familiar to our 
daily speech, and we know very well what we mean 
when we use it. We know that we have in mind 
our self-conscious persons as distinct from objects 
about us. But when we come to analyze this "I," 
this self of which we speak ; when we attempt to 
tell, or even to form a definite conception of what 
it really is, the difficulty of the task at once appears. 
It is always something more than we can put into 
words ; something vaster than any definition that 
we can frame. It has in it the vastness of the in- 
finite. When we have told all and thought all, 
there are yet undiscovered depths beyond into which 
it recedes and from which we are entirely unable to 
extricate it. There are abyssmal depths of person- 
ality which startle us at times by their vastness and 
the vistas which they but half disclose. We are 
dimly aware of undeveloped powers within us ; 
capabilities of energy and intelligence and love, 
which, on minds which have pondered them, have 
forced the conviction of a life beyond as the sole 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 249 

condition in which a personal being can find scope. 
So akin is the self to the infinite, as that Lotze 
goes so far as to say, "In point of fact, we have 
little ground for speaking of the personality of 
finite beings ; it is an ideal, and like all that is ideal 
belongs unconditionally to the infinite. Perfect 
personality is found alone in God, and to all finite 
minds there is allotted but a pale copy thereof." 

" A very little word," says Charles Kingsley, " is 
this ' I.' For in our language there is but one letter 
in it. A very common word ; for we are using it 
all day long when we are awake, and even at night 
in our dreams. And yet a wonderful word, for 
though we know well whom it means, yet what it 
means we do not know and cannot understand ; no, 
nor can the wisest philosopher who has lived. And 
a most important word, too, for we cannot get rid 
of it, cannot help saying it all our life long from 
childhood to the grave." 

Reflecting on the mysteries of the life of the 
flower, Tennyson pens these familiar lines : 

" Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of your crannies, 
And hold you here in my hand, little 
Flower, roots and all, and all in all, 



250 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

And if I could tell what you are 

Roots and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is." 

Nearer the truth would it have been, had he 
written those words of the Ego, the person ; for to 
know the Ego would, indeed, be to know what God 
is. Itself the image of God, it is also His most 
accurate expression ; for it is just this mystery of 
personality, its profound depths, into which it is 
impossible to penetrate, that constitutes not alone 
the mysterious and hidden in man, but also the un- 
knowable in God. 

" There is," says Victor Hugo, " an infinite out- 
side of us. Is there not an infinite within us? 
These two infinities, do they not rest superposed 
on one another ? Does not the second infinite 
underlie the first, so to speak ? Is not the mirror, 
the reflection, the echo of the first, an abyss concen- 
tric with another abyss ? The ' me ' below is the 
soul ; the ' me ' above is God." And yet, myste- 
rious as it is, we do know the person. We know 
it because we know others and because we know 
ourselves. In history we see persons, thinking, 
acting, loving, and these become objects of reflec- 
tion. In literature, in language, and in human 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 25 1 

life personality gives itself expression and we are 
able to determine what it is which so expresses itself. 
But above all, we know ourselves. And in reflect- 
ing on ourselves we are made acquainted with the 
person. But when we thus reflect, we discover that 
the constituent elements of personality, as such, 
are self-consciousness, desire and self-control. And 
that is to say, that personality is made up by the 
combination of the three powers, intellect, suscepti- 
bility and volition, united in self-conscious unity. 
The " I," possessed of the power to think, to feel 
and to will, and at the same time conscious that it 
exercises these powers, is the person. Wherever 
these are present there is the person ; wherever they 
are absent there is ,the impersonal. Personality is 
the ultimate reality in us. The spirit possessed of 
the three functions of knowing, feeling, willing, is 
the person. Well, this being the case, two conclu- 
sions follow. First, that corporiety is no part of 
the person. " It is the soul," said Heraclitus, " that 
is you ; the body that is yours" So far as the body 
is concerned, it is only the servant, the medium 
through which impressions from the outward world 
come and the organ for the expression of its life and 
action. The spirit, with its essential powers, is cap- 



252 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

able of living a separate life, in which it would come 
to a knowledge of external things otherwise than 
through sensations, and express itself otherwise than 
through the body. The body may be eliminated and 
the person yet remain. But just because there can be 
no substitute for intellect, susceptibility, or will, it 
follows that these are of the essence of personality. 
These are essential, and they are all that is essential 
to the person, for the spirit is the person. 

But just as the body is not essential to the person, 
so neither is it necessary to our knowledge of what 
the person is. It is not even vital to our fellowship 
with persons. In our thoughts of others we can and 
do eliminate the body entirely. They influence us, 
make themselves known, and we in turn influence 
them in ways other than that of physical mediation. 
In our truest fellowship we touch others on the 
spiritual side alone. We feel the influence of some- 
thing in them that cannot be defined, and which, for 
want of a better name, we call their personality. 
Think, if you please, of some particular person, of 
whom you possess intimate knowledge. Is it the 
bodily form that is present in your mind when you 
think of such a one's real self, or is your knowledge 
of such a one dependent on your ability to recall 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 253 

his physical appearance, his height, or bulk, or 
anything that is merely physical ? Are not these 
outward things merely accidental, and do we not 
know persons apart from them ? I think we must 
admit that the spiritual personality is not one 
with the organs and means through which it ex- 
hibits itself and that we are able to dispense with 
them entirely, and yet leave the person in all 
that is essential. Indeed, it is frequently quite 
impossible to recall the outward appearance, or 
in reflection to associate it with the person of 
whom we may be thinking. We are perfectly 
familiar with persons whom we have never seen 
and of whom we have been unable to form even 
a mental picture. Oft among those who have influ- 
enced us the most, and of whom we know the most, 
are those who have impressed us only on the side of 
the spirit. We regard them as our kindred and are 
certain that we know them. Yet they lived their 
lives, uttered their thoughts, inspired the souls of 
their own generation, and passed away, leaving no 
painter to put the tenement which they inhabited on 
canvas, or sculptor to invisage it in marble. Still we 
think of them as persons and have spiritual fellow- 
ship with them. They are real to us, although no 



254 TH E NATURE OF GOD. 

form arises before the mind when we think of them. 
Who, for instance, is able to call before his mind 
with any definiteness the form of Him who, more 
than any other, has and even yet most influences the 
world — I mean the one of Nazareth ? Who so real 
to the multitudes who daily feel the power of His 
thought and soul ? Or of whom do the spiritually- 
minded know more ; or with whom have they so 
real and constant fellowship ? Yet to all such He 
is the formless, the incorporeal. The best known, 
the most loved, the most constantly present of all 
who have lived or are now living, yet He is seen 
alone by the eye of the soul. In all that made Him 
what He was ; in the transcendent power of His 
personality, He yet lives and moves and has His 
being among us, although His body passed from the 
sight of men into the yielding clouds which received 
Him out of the sight of the disciples. No, the 
body is not essential to our knowledge of the per- 
son, nor does it make fellowship any the more real. 
It belongs entirely to the accidental. The self- 
conscious, self-controlled spirit, this alone is essen- 
tial. In fact, it is just to the body that we refer 
most of those hindrances which shut us out from 
the realization of a true personality. Itself imper- 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 255 

sonal, it is a hindrance, rather than a help. Until 
it is shuffled off and the spirit liberated, we can be 
but in part what we are destined to be. In our 
present state we are never fully self-conscious, nor 
are we at any time self-controlled. We are limited 
within and without, and it is only in our best moods 
that there comes to us even a vision of what perfect 
personality may be. Yet the one thing of which 
we are certain is that the limitations by which we 
are now beset are not essential to the spirit. " We 
are conditioned," says Prof. Bowne, "by something 
not ourselves. The outer world is an important 
factor in our mental life. It controls us more than 
we do it. But this is a limitation of our personality, 
rather than its source. Our personality would be 
heightened, rather than diminished, if we were self- 
determinant in this respect. Again, in our inner 
life, we find the same limitations. We cannot 
always control our ideas. They often seem to be 
occurrences in us rather than our own doing. The 
past vanishes beyond recall, and often in the present 
we are more passive than active. But these, also, 
are limitations of our personality. We should be 
more truly persons if we were absolutely determi- 
nant of all our states." 



256 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

And so when we speak of God as personal we 
do not think of Him as being such in the limited 
sense in which we are. He is the perfect person. 
He is in its completeness what we are but in part. 
In Him the absolute self-knowledge and self-pos- 
session which are necessary to perfect personality 
alone are found. In His complete self-determina- 
tion and consciousness do we find the conditions of 
perfect personality, and of this our finite is but a 
feeble and imperfect image. But though imperfect 
and obscured as personality is in us, it is, neverthe- 
less, a true reflection of the divine. The limitations 
which beset the human spirit have not destroyed in 
it the image and likeness of the One in whose like- 
ness it was fashioned. The fact that it knows its 
imperfections, feels its limitations, longs to throw 
them off that it may enter on a life of perfect free- 
dom, proves that it is conscious of its true nature 
and that in essence it is one with God. Were the 
spirit unconscious of its limitations, did it not look 
upon them as foreign to itself and hindrances to its 
true life, this would not be the case. It is just this 
consciousness of the spirit that it is limited that 
proves it in nature to be one with the Eternal. 

Well, now, when we divest personality of that 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 257 

which does not really belong to it, when we think 
of it as something apart from the body and freed 
from its limitations, is it speaking lightly of God 
to affirm that He is a person ? Clearly, if we are to 
think of Him at all, if He is for our thought to be 
redeemed from the dark realm of the unknowable, 
we must have some conception of what He is. If 
we know Him at all He must be something specific 
and particular. We must have some definite idea 
or the mind cannot lay hold of Him and He inev- 
itably recedes into the realm of the unknowable. 
But what higher conception is possible than this in 
which He is conceived as a person ? Does Hart- 
man's " Unconscious," or Schopenhaur's " Will and 
Idea," or Leibnitz's " Absolute Monad," or Arnold's 
" Eternal Not Ourselves That Makes for Righteous- 
ness," or Spencer's " Unknowable Power Behind 
Phenomena " — do either of these, in all conscience, 
present a more lofty conception of the Eternal God 
than this term person which the devout soul has 
always applied to Him ? What loftier conception 
can the mind possibly have of God than this in 
which He is divested of all corporiety, all human 
limitations, and in which He is construed in terms 
the loftiest that our experience affords ? For at last 
17 



258 THK NATURE OF GOD. 

our most exalted ideas are those which take shape 
and embody themselves in personality ; personality 
infinitely overtops the impersonal. It is just in 
this that the pre-eminence of' man over the rest of 
the creation resides. It is the supremest excellence 
of which we can think. And surely it is not by 
appealing to the lowest conceptions that nature 
supplies, but the very highest that we are to ap- 
proach the One who is transcendent in every excel- 
lence. It is not by expressing the Supreme Being 
in terms of physical force or of matter and motion, 
but, on the contrary, in terms of spiritual action, of 
will and intelligence ; in a word, by thinking of 
Him as personal. To refuse to form any concep- 
tion of the Supreme Being is to rest in vacuity. 
But in the forming of our conception let us by all 
means start from the highest level of experience 
and not from the lower. 

Such, then, is the idea of the Deity to which re- 
ligion seeks to give expression through means of 
its anthropomorphisms. Its thought is not that of 
a titanic physical being beneath whose weight the 
heavens bend and whose ponderous tread causes the 
earth to tremble. The kinship with the Deity to 
which it lays claim is entirely personal and spir- 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 259 

itual. Corporiety does not enter into it ; and while 
its representations of God are borrowed from our 
human nature, the religious soul seldom, if ever, 
fails to pass beyond the anthropomorphic figure into 
the hidden spiritual meaning. 

And thus, from whatever standpoint we regard it, 
the anthropomorphic conception of God holds its 
place. It alone attaches no leashes to the Infinite. 
On the contrary, it leaves Him in the full possession 
of that power, the absence of which is the negation of 
Deity, the power of self-control. And is it not this 
power of self-control, without which Deity itself is 
impossible, that is wanting in all those abstract 
and metaphysical deities which are offered by phi- 
losophy as substitutes for the personal God of re- 
ligion ? They are each and all the victims of a 
limitless power with which their own deity vests 
them, but over which they have as little control as 
the storm or the earthquake over the forces that 
impel them on. But it is this power of self-control, 
this freedom from all limitations, whether from 
without or from within, and which is the possession 
of the perfect person, that vests the God of religion 
with all the attributes essential to real Deity. 
Whether in the armies of heaven, among the chil- 



26o THE NATURE OF GOD. 

dren of men or in the realm of His own nature, 
such a Being is able to do whatsoever is pleasing to 
Himself. Whatever we may think of the legiti- 
macy of human terms as applied to the Deity, they 
nevertheless find abundant warrant in the nature of 
the One who is perfectly self-conscious and self- 
controlled, and who, on this account, is not only 
supreme, but, in the innermost of His nature, also 
profoundly spiritual. 

But I must now call attention to a fact, which of 
itself is sufficient to silence every possible objection 
to the anthropomorphic conception of God. I speak 
of the fact of the Incarnation ; that event accom- 
plished in history, in which the Eternal God took 
upon Himself our nature, united Himself with it, 
and lived on the earth in the person of the man 
Jesus. It was in this act that the kinship of God 
and man was confirmed, and the right of every soul 
to look up into the face of God and to call Him 
Father conclusively established. It was this act 
that proved that to be a human being is also to be 
a child of God and in the possession of the divine 
image. And it proved this kinship, for the reason 
that likeness in nature between the human and the 
Divine is antecedently essential to the incarnation. 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 26 1 

The child is in nature like the father, the father 
like the child. And then, too, with God there can 
be no change, for the reason that He is perfect. 
At no moment is He less or more. Least of all, by 
any act will He violate the self-imposed laws that 
hold in the realm of His own being. Accordingly, 
if His union with humanity is to be actual and not 
one in appearance only, its realization is made pos- 
sible by reason of the fact that the divine already 
involves the human and comprehends it in its 
essence. But a Deity who, without violence to 
His nature, can identify Himself with man so com- 
pletely as in very soul to be one with Him, is not 
only infinite in power but also anthropomorphic as 
to His innermost life. To such a being, the title 
God-man will not be a misnomer. 

To be sure, when we reason thus from the incar- 
nation back to the nature of God, the fact of His 
incarnation is taken for granted. And to all who 
through experience have found that in finding Jesus 
they have also found God, that fact is abundantly 
confirmed. To all such, Jesus stands utterly alone, 
the solitary among men. Not as a prophet, but more 
than a prophet. Not as one pointing to the Deity, 
but Himself " the brightness of the Father's glory 



262 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

and the express image of His person." For were 
not God in Jesus, and were not the words that He 
spake concerning Himself true when He declared, 
" He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," then 
no one in finding the man Jesus would, in finding 
Him, also find God. 

But we are not shut up to private experience for 
our proof of the reality of the incarnation. Aside 
from such witness, there are proofs valid to all. 
Indeed, when we have admitted the spiritual nature 
of the Deity, there is no possible escape from the 
conclusion that He will become incarnate — for to a 
spiritual being the incarnation is a necessity. We 
have already seen, that to a perfect person no leashes 
are attached and no limitations affixed. Possessed 
of all power, such a one will do whatever is pleasing 
to himself. To such a one no power can oppose 
itself or say, " Hitherto shalt thou come, but no 
further." But, as self-controlled, such a one will 
also be capable of self-limitation. He will be able 
to take upon Himself a human form, to live a life 
in the flesh and under its conditions ; share with 
man his lot, descend into the grave, that by His 
rising its bands may be broken, and ascend into the 
heavens, bearing our redeemed nature with Him. 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 263 

To a perfect person nothing that pleases Him can 
be impossible, for the reason that such a one is 
perfectly self-controlled. But, just because He is the 
perfect person, God is also spiritual in the inmost of 
His nature, and possessed of that which is one of 
the essential elements of a spiritual being — the ele- 
ment of love. Well, if all this be admitted, as it 
must be when it is owned that God is a person, how 
are we to escape the conclusion that sooner or later 
the incarnation must be an accomplished fact in 
history ? I hold that a perfect personal Deity, pos- 
sessed as He must needs be of limitless power along 
with infinite love, makes His incarnation a moral 
necessity. For, what at last is this love that con- 
stitutes the essence of a spiritual nature ? Is it not 
a life in others ? Is it not a going forth out of self ? 
To have all the hidden wealth of thought and feel- 
ing of which it is possessed called forth in relation 
to other and kindred beings, and to receive back 
again that wealth redoubled in reciprocated knowl- 
edge and affection? Surely, nothing short of this 
is to live the spiritual life. Not to do this is to 
take out of life all that makes it spiritual. How- 
ever we may seek to avoid it, the conclusion cannot 
be escaped, that the incarnation is the necessary 



264 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

goal of that infinite power and love which are the 
possession of the perfect person. 

But that which in the spiritual nature of God 
was made antecedently possible and morally certain, 
in the fulness of time, became actual in history in 
the person of the man Jesus. In Him dwelt all the 
fulness of the Godhead bodily. In Him, as John 
tells us, the men of His generation beheld the 
" genuine God." And, as such, He was believed on 
and accepted by all who knew Him best. As such 
He declared Himself to be. With a calmness that 
must have been a stranger to the boldest of mere 
men, He laid claim to that august title. He ever 
pointed to Himself as the concrete embodiment of 
all that He said and taught concerning God. Not 
so did the wisest and best of those who have lived 
and taught among men. The dying Buddha puts 
his confidence in the truth of his teaching. He 
leaves his disciples the admonition that they may 
forget him ; but they are to keep his teaching and 
the way that he has shown them. Plato says the 
same of Socrates. Let us own that in the whole 
range of history there are no other figures apart 
from Jesus which so surprise us with the originality 
of their moral strength as do these two, yet each 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 265 

hides himself behind the teaching for which he 
lived and died ; while Jesus knows no more sacred 
task than that of pointing men to Himself as the 
incarnation of all that He came to reveal. And by 
word and life, by all that He was and by all that 
He did, He successfully defended that claim against 
all unbiased criticism. 

I have not the time to tell you how that, in every 
particular, Jesus vindicated His claim to Deity. It 
is quite sufficient to say that He did reveal God. 
That in Him, the Deity, " who at sundry times and 
in divers manners spake in time past unto the 
fathers by the prophets," was made manifest in 
concrete form to the eyes of men. That from the 
day of His ascension until now, the wisest and the 
best, goaded by that hunger with which we have 
been created, have turned to Him as did the wise 
men of the East to His cradle at Bethlehem. That 
all the knowledge that we have or can have of God 
was made possible through His life and person. 
He did reveal God. And when He finished His 
work here below, He left impressed on the minds 
of men an image of the Deity that can never be 
effaced. 

But if He revealed God, then He was Himself 



266 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

God. That which is less is incapable of revealing 
the greater. The revealer of Deity can be none 
other than Deity Himself. When He said, "No 
man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to 
whomsoever the Son will reveal him," He spoke a 
truth, confirmed in the experience of the multiplied 
millions who have found that in finding Jesus the 
soul has always confessed to itself and said, " Thou 
art with God." 

I am aware that there are those who imagine a 
God other and greater than Jesus ; who look upon 
Jesus as having indeed been possessed of a divine 
consciousness such as no other has ever possessed, 
yet for all that, as one whose work is accomplished 
when he has once brought the soul into communion 
with God. But who is this other God, if it be not 
Jesus Himself ? What attribute belongs to Him 
that does not belong to Jesus ? Or in what respect 
does this other and greater God differ from Jesus ? 
The attempt to candidly answer these questions 
is certain to lead to the discovery that all that enters 
into the conception of such a God has been uncon- 
sciously taken from the words and life of Jesus. It 
is His protraiture, as given in the Scripture, and 
His alone, that furnishes the data out of which this 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 267 

other and greater is constructed. The moment we 
depart from Him, we leave reality behind us, and our 
vaunted God becomes but the product of our own 
subjective ideas. To get away from Him is to sever 
religion from the objective power which is the 
enduring basis of its experiences, for this power is 
not in thoughts or ideas, but in Jesus, who actually 
lived in the world. He is the only God whom we 
know, or can know. 

And it was this Deity who, in the days of His 
flesh, also called himself the Son of man. It was 
this Deity who, by His sympathy, His compassion, 
His fidelity as a friend, and His lovableness as a 
companion — in a word, by His ability to weep with 
those who wept, and to rejoice with those who did 
rejoice, proved the oneness of His soul with ours. 
But while thus testifying to His true humanity, He 
asserts, with equal emphasis, His real divinity. 
Affirming Himself to be the Son of man, He like- 
wise declares Himself to be the Son of God. Con- 
scious of His oneness with the Father, He says, " I 
am in the Father and the Father in me. He that 
hath seen me hath seen the Father." Conscious of 
His eternity, He declares, " My Father worketh 
hitherto, and I work." "Before Abraham was, I 



268 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

am." Could any utterance more clearly assert the 
humanity that is in God, or the divinity resident in 
the nature which -He assumed than these ? And is it 
still a matter of wonder, in view of the fact that our 
nature was so assumed, that anthropomorphisms 
should characterize our best conceptions of the 
Deity ? In the incarnation His personality is once 
and for all established. Identifying Himself with 
us, in the innermost of His life, He is also, as we 
are, both personal and spiritual. 

And this is the distinctive element of Christian- 
ity — its personal and incarnate God. It was this 
element that made it new to the thought of man 
and imparted to it that vitality without which it 
could not have held its place in the world. Hitherto 
the idea of a human deity, a God-man, had been 
foreign to human thought. Judaism had no place 
for it. Its Jehovah was too great, too exalted in 
His ineffable holiness and awful majesty to find in 
man a dwelling place. To the Jew an incarnate 
God was a stumbling-block, and to the Greek it was 
foolishness. For no philosophy from the days of 
Plato until now has left room for the conception of 
the essential oneness of the Deity with humanity 
as it is presented in Jesus. Philosophy has never 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 269 

risen above an ideal unity, a unity of thought and 
image, a unity in appearance only. The essential 
unity accomplished in Jesus was Christianity's gift 
to the thought of the world. 

And it is this new and vital element that makes 
Christianity the only real religion. It opens a way 
for that fellowship with the Deity, without which 
true religion is impossible. Think of it as we will, 
the soul needs an anthropomorphic Deity ; a God 
that can be touched with a feeling of our infirmities 
for the reason that He Himself has been in all points 
tempted like ourselves. A God who can share all 
the struggles and travails of humanity ; who can 
sympathize ; who has Himself felt the extremity of 
human anguish and the agony of bereavement ; who 
has Himself submitted to the wrongs so oft inflicted 
on the innocent and become acquainted with the 
pangs of death. A Deity, not outside the universe 
and above its struggles, but who, on the contrary, 
enters into the storm and conflict and is subject to 
its conditions as the soul of it all. 

And such is the Deity that Christianity alone 
offers to the world. You may call Him a human 
God ; or, reversing the terms, a God-man if you 
choose. He is, nevertheless, the only God capable 



270 THE NATURE OE GOD. 

of affording that consolation for the present and 
that hope for the future which are the deepest 
needs of the soul ; and it is this conception of an 
incarnate God, attested and confirmed in the experi- 
ence of innumerable multitudes, who, in finding 
Jesus, have also found God, that has given to 
Christianity its hold on the thoughts and hearts of 
men. It is this perception of an anthropomorphic 
God, which, in the words of Sir Oliver Lodge, 
" constitutes the vital element which has enabled 
Christianity to survive all the struggles for exist- 
ence and to dominate the most cultivated peoples of 
the world." For is it not true that the forces by 
which we are most dominated are those which 
emanate from persons, and that influences increase 
in their power over us just in the measure that they 
pass from the realm of the impersonal into that of 
the personal ? At last it is personality that moves 
the world. I do not deny that ideas, even pure 
abstractions, have a measure of power over us, or 
that mere precepts, when made a rule of conduct, 
mold us for the better. They do ; but alone they 
are incomparably weak in the presence of those in- 
fluences that radiate from a person. 

See how this is illustrated in the progress of the 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 27 1 

revelation that God gave to His people. It began 
with the abstraction, " I am." But this revelation, 
so far as it was such, failed to inspire men's souls 
with devotion to the Deity. It awakened wonder 
and awe. It served to distinguish the living God 
from the lifeless deities of Egypt and Canaan, but 
that was about all. God needed to come nearer and 
to approach more closely the realm of the personal. 
Then He becomes something to men. He is now 
known as Refuge, Rock, Tower and Shield. Later 
He comes still nearer and becomes the Shepherd, a 
being capable of sympathy, tender and watchful. 
At last, in the fullness of times, all abstractions are 
removed ; His relations to man are no longer pict- 
ured in names, rich though they were in meaning. 
He became incarnate in the flesh and stood among 
men, the One altogether lovely. And when this 
was accomplished men found themselves within the 
grasp of a power that dominated every energy of 
their souls. It was the Deity, incarnate in Jesus, 
that lifted God out of an abstraction and presented 
the image of the Eternal Glory in His own person. 
And what happened to the men who first received 
this revelation? They were transfigured. Cold 
obedience was changed into enthusiastic service of a 



272 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

person. Formal observance was changed into pas- 
sionate devotion to Him for whose sake suffering and 
even death became a joy. And herein is the utter 
impotence of all these deities that philosophy offers 
to the world. They are all mere abstractions, incapa- 
ble of inspiring men with enthusiasm, for the reason 
that they are wanting in personality. True, they 
stimulate the intellect, but they leave the heart cold 
and lifeless. " Monads " and " substances " and 
" ideas," have no power to quicken men in the inner- 
most. To the hungry soul they all offer a stone, in- 
stead of bread. What disciple of Leibnitz, or Spin- 
oza, or Hegel or Fichte has traversed sea and land, 
or traveled, though with weary feet, the waste and 
desert places of the earth, to bring to men a knowl- 
edge of these abstractions ? Such enthusiasm is 
born out of the soul's love for another, a being 
stronger than self, yet one with self, and in whom 
it finds the answer to its own infinite needs. 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 

THE TRINITY. 

In the year of our L,ord 325, there was given 
to the world the most important document ever 
produced by the uninspired genius of man. I 
speak of the Nicene Creed. It is an attempt to 
express in technical terms the content of the 
Scripture as it bears on the nature of God. For 
more than three centuries Christianity had lived 
and wrought without a formal expression of its 
great dogmatic idea. It accepted the simple state- 
ments of the Scripture as they bore on the question, 
derived its life from fellowship with the manifested 
God who had dwelt among men, and was preserved 
from laxness in theory by the extraordinary vigor 
and vitality of the Divine life that filled the souls 
of its early adherents. 

But, just because of what it was, Christianity 
could not escape the necessity of a scientific ex- 
pression of its cardinal truth. It was not a thing 
destined to live its life shut up to the inner and 
private experience of its early disciples. It had 
18 (273) 



274 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

also its intellectual side. It possessed its own dis- 
tinct concept of God, in that it thought of Him in 
the light of the manifestation which He had given of 
Himself in Jesus. It knew no God other than the 
one who had become incarnate in human flesh and 
who had lived among men. It saw in Jesus " the 
brightness of the Father's glory and the express 
image of His person," and accordingly worshiped 
Him as Deity. 

But a conception of an incarnate God — a Deity 
who could become the companion of man, because 
one in nature with him, could not in that age go 
unchallenged. It could not, for the reason that 
it was an age in which the prevailing philosophy 
had banished God from His universe. It was an 
age when philosophy had taught men to regard the 
Deity from the standpoint of absolute transcendence, 
and to think of Him as living His life in solitary 
and awful grandeur, apart from the world and men. 
Between the Deity and the world there yawned an 
impassable chasm, growing out of His own inherent 
majesty, on the one hand, and the evil resident in 
the world on the other. Thus, between the Chris- 
tian conception of a God brought near in Jesus, and 
that of a philosophy which conceived Him as utterly 



THE TRINITY. 275 

remote, there existed a fundamental antagonism. 
Both could not exist together, yet both claimed the 
right of supremacy which belongs to truth. 

Now, it was out of this soil that the various here- 
sies of the early centuries of the Church sprang. One 
and all they were attempts to mediate between these 
opposing conceptions by engrafting upon Christian- 
ity the ideas of Pagan and Oriental philosophy. 
They sought to give to the world a religion divested 
of an incarnate God, and, as before Herod, to again 
vest Jesus with a mock crown. In the interests of 
such a religion Monarchianism denied His essential 
deity, and Arianism made Him but one among a 
multitude of aeons which rilled the yawning chasm 
between a transcendent God and the world. The 
question which agitated the Church, and which had 
to be answered, was the one which Jesus had Him- 
self proposed, "What think ye of Christ? Whose 
Son is He?" Is He only David's son — a mere 
man ? Or is He not also David's Lord — the true 
God, the Lord of hosts ? Never has there been pre- 
sented a more important question, or one upon 
which the supreme interests of man were so de- 
pendent. 

Well, it was to this question, forced to the front 



276 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

as it had been by the Arian heresy, to which the 
Council of Nicea was compelled to make answer. 
Let us own that the answer was not an easy one. It 
was one which required a profound knowledge of 
the Scripture as it bore on the question, as well as an 
intimacy with those metaphysical terms, in which, 
on account of its peculiar nature, the content of the 
Scripture could alone be expressed. It was the task 
of maintaining the distinct and eternal existence of 
the Father, Son and Spirit, on the one hand, with- 
out destroying the unity of God on the other. It 
was that of maintaining the complete Deity of Jesus 
without endangering the unity in the bosom of the 
Godhead. In a word, it was that of exhibiting the 
doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness, of bring- 
ing into the creed statement the total data of the 
Scripture as it bore on the side of both the unity 
and the trinity. 

With the results of that struggle at Nicea you are 
already well acquainted. Out of it there came a 
creed which ever since has been the joy and boast 
of entire Christendom. A creed in which Protestant 
and Catholic alike unite in glad acknowledgment of 
the deity of their common Lord. A creed which for 
well nigh sixteen centuries has stood against all op- 



THE TRINITY. 277 

position, whether of Unitarian, subordinationism or 
philosophical analysis. A creed which by its vital- 
ity has vindicated its claim to being the true and 
only rational expression of the oneness of Jesus with 
God, as well as of the distinctions eternally existing 
in the bosom of the Godhead. A creed which in its 
confession of the unity in trinity and the trinity in 
unity in the Divine nature at once affirms the pro- 
found personality of God, and furnishes to thought a 
basis upon which it is yet to build its noblest and 
most enduring temple. It is my purpose in the pres- 
ent lecture to call attention to several items of this 
creed, in the hope of vindicating what may have 
seemed a very extravagant statement, made at the 
beginning, concerning its importance and worth. 
Permit me to quote the two confessional sentences 
of which this remarkable formula was originally 
composed. 

" We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, 
Maker of all things visible and invisible ; and in 
one Iyord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of 
the Father. God of God, Light of light, very God 
of very God, Begotten not made, of one substance 
with the Father. . . . And in the Holy Ghost." 

You will observe that the creed first confesses the 



278 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

important doctrine of the unity of God. " We be- 
lieve in one God." It conserves what Monarchian- 
ism and Arianism vainly sought to conserve, by sac- 
rificing the truth of the essential trinity. But it does 
it in the only way in which the spiritual oneness 
can possibly be maintained — that is, by the acknowl- 
edgment of the existence of hypostatic distinctions 
in the Divine nature itself. And it was able to ac- 
complish this, for the reason that its framers had 
laid hold of the higher idea of the Deity native to 
the Scripture, but utterly foreign to philosophy, in 
which the Divine unity is conceived as that of a 
spiritual being rather than that of a mathematical 
concept. It declared the Christian idea of God to 
be, indeed, monotheistic. But its monotheism was 
not the kind which is involved in the notion of 
a self -identical, solitary Deity, incapable of either 
movement or love, because of His abstract and 
barren singleness. The creed presented God in the 
richness of a complex nature, triple in His unity, 
and one in His triplicity, in opposition to absolute 
monotheism, with its barren and impoverished 
notion of oneness, as identical with singleness of 
essence. In other words, the creed presents God as 
a personal, a spiritual being, in whom oneness and 



THE TRINITY. 279 

threeness finds its best analogue and exhibition 
in self-conscious and personal beings, such as we 
ourselves are. It is this Christian conception of 
God as personal and living, because He is one and 
yet three, that makes the Nicene Creed what it is 
to the world. Let us now observe how its repre- 
sentation of God, in which He is presented, not as a 
mathematical unit, but in the richness of a triune 
nature, enriches thought, opens the door for the in- 
carnation, and establishes once and for all the fact 
of the Divine personality. 

I remark, first, that the doctrine of the Trinity 
enriches thought in that it presents a universal 
formula. 

You will agree, that in all of its attempts to in- 
terpret the world, thought has experienced the need 
of a universal formula. By this, I mean some idea 
or conception or principle of unity in which the 
diverse and opposing realities of the world may be 
reconciled. To discover such a principle has been 
the aim of every philosophy. Liebnitz thought 
that he had discovered it in the " Monad " ; Spinoza 
in " Substance " ; Fichte, in the " Ego and the Non 
Ego " ; Shelling, in the " Absolute," and Hegel, in 
the "Idea." Every system has presented us with 



28o THE NATURE OF GOD. 

some new and all-comprehensive category, by means 
of which it hopes to lead us through the laborin- 
thine structure of the world. 

And yet no formula yet proposed has proven 
itself capable of reconciling the antagonisms which 
a consideration of the world presents, or of uniting 
the world in a single conception. All have failed, 
for the reason that they have left out some impor- 
tant element, and by so doing have forfeited their 
claim to being a universal philosophy. 

Now, it is just this principle of unity that Chris- 
tianity furnishes to thought, in its doctrine of the 
trinity and unity of God. It takes up the truth 
in every system, puts it into its proper relation to 
other truth, and, by so doing, resolves into unity 
the dualism of the world, which has been the bane 
of every speculative system of thought that has yet 
been offered. I^et us see how it does this. 

It will be agreed, that from the beginning the 
mind of man, in its attempt to conceive the Abso- 
lute, has oscillated between the two poles of Abso- 
lute Monotheism and Pantheism. Between a con- 
ception of the Deity as transcendent, unknowable, 
unapproachable and separate from the world, and 
that of a Deity immanent in the world and insep- 



THE TRINITY. 28 1 

arable from it. It is for the reason that both of 
these conceptions contain a truth that is vital, that 
they have expressed all that is highest and best in 
unassisted thought from the days of Plato to the 
present. 

Absolute Monotheism stands for a truth. It is 
that of the Divine transcendence. It lays stress on 
the eternal distinctions which separate between the 
infinite and the finite, on account of which God, as to 
His innermost nature and being must ever remain 
the unknown and utterly remote. For, in a sense, 
God is, indeed, the One past finding out ; the high 
and lofty One who inhabits eternity, obscured by 
clouds and thick darkness. Job utters the truth of 
absolute Monotheism in his question, " Canst thou 
by searching find out God ? Canst thou find out 
the Almighty to perfection ? It is high as heaven, 
what canst thou do ? deeper than hell, what canst 
thou know?" And yet, such a statement taken 
alone does not tell the whole truth. It emphasizes 
the fact of the Divine transcendence, but omits the 
equally important truth, that of the Divine imma- 
nence. It makes much of God's unknowableness, 
and nothing of the fact that He is also well known. 
And that is to say, that Monotheism needs the 



282 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

complementary truth for which Pantheism stands to 
save it from the barren shoals of Atheism, to which 
it inevitably tends. For man has little interest in 
a Deity whose dignity is compromised by fellow- 
ship with His creatures, or who regards their needs 
and sorrows from afar. Such a Deity is too subtle 
for the intellect and too cold for the heart, and is 
certain sooner or later to be conducted to the utter- 
most frontier of the universe, where, enthroned in 
majestic inaction, He is bidden a respectful adieu. 

And Pantheism also has its truth. As opposed 
to Deism and Agnosticism, it stands for the truth 
of the Divine nearness. In nature, in history, and, 
above all, in the spirit of man, God is. In the daisy 
by the dusty wayside ; in the mote that hangs lazily 
in the evening air ; in the planet shining in the 
dome above ; in the forces that control and bind 
into cosmic unity all that is, God's presence resides. 
It is the truth of Pantheism, or, if you please, the fact 
of the omnipresence of God that the psalmist puts 
into his question, " Whither shall I flee from Thy 
presence ? If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there. 
If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. 
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the 
uttermost part of the sea, even there shall Thy 



THE TRINITY. 283 

hand lead me and Thy right hand uphold me." It 
is the native longing of the soul for a God who is 
near, even by our side, that gives to Pantheism the 
place which it has always held in Oriental, and 
which it to-day holds in European thought. And 
we may be sure that what has obtained so wide a 
currency, or what has held so powerful a sway over 
the minds of men, is not wholly false. Pantheism, 
like Monotheism, has its truth, and that truth is the 
immanence of God. 

And yet the truth contained in philosophical 
Pantheism, like that contained in Deism, is but 
partial. Taken alone, Pantheism leads to Atheism. 
Reduced to its lowest terms, it forces the choice be- 
tween the alike fatal alternatives of affirming that 
God is all, or that He is nothing. If He is all, then 
He is also by inclusion the basest even of moral 
evil. If He is not all, He is evaporated into an 
abstraction so exaggerated as to transcend existence 
itself. Pantheism alone leads to Atheism. 

And thus the truth contained in each of these 
opposing systems needs the truth contained in the 
other to give it completeness and to make it satis- 
fying to the intelligent thought of men. Tran- 
scendence without immanence gives us Deism, cold, 



284 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

barren and atheistic. Immanence without tran- 
scendence gives us Pantheism, fatalistic and morally 
palsying. Neither is without the other, and a true 
conception of the Absolute must include both. 

Now, it is here that the Christian doctrine of the 
trinity and triunity is of immense service to specu- 
lative thought. It mediates between the extremes 
of philosophical Pantheism and Deism, conserving 
the truth, while it at the same time corrects the 
errors of each. In its presentation of God as one 
in substance and three in persons, it opens the way 
for His transcendence as well as for His immanence. 
It declares that God is, indeed, one. But He is not 
one in the sense in which Deism thinks of Him as 
one. He is not a mathematical unit, but rather a 
spiritual unity. On account of His triune nature 
He not only exists in three modes, but also sustains 
a threefold relation to the world. Because of the 
richness of His nature He is capable of a life above 
the world and also in it. As the Lord of all, He is 
above the world. As the life of all, He is within it. 
Though dwelling in the world as its life and energy, 
He is yet above the world and distinct from it. 
Being the infinite Spirit, He is not wholly occupied 
with the world, nor are His powers exhausted in the 



THE TRINITY. 285 

control of its processes. His relation to the world 
is not that of the life to the tree, which does all that 
it can do when it makes the tree what it is. God 
is in the world as the spirit of man is in the body, 
for, though it dwells in the body, controlling it and 
directing it, the spirit is yet greater than the body, 
and capable of activities that far transcend the 
physical realm. The Trinitarian idea of God is 
that of a free spirit, personal, self-directing and un- 
exhausted by His temporal world activities. 

And thus does the doctrine of the trinity, when 
rightly understood, mediate between the opposing 
systems of Deism and Pantheism. It absorbs into 
itself the truth in the Deistic contention that God 
is transcendent and infinite, as well as the truth of 
Pantheism that He is immanent in the world. But 
while it does this, it also rejects the errors of both. 
In its affirmation of the constant presence of God in 
the world, it rules out Deism, and discredits it as a 
valid and comprehensive philosophy. While in its 
conception of God as above and apart from the 
world, it rules out Pantheism. 

And so, likewise, the doctrine of the trinity and 
triunity also acknowledges the rightful claim even 
of Agnosticism, when it affirms that there is that in 



286 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

the infinite and absolute Deity that transcends our 
finite comprehension. It acknowledges that as to 
His innermost nature and being God is the hidden, 
the unapproachable. That on this side He is, indeed, 
an abyss into which no thought can penetrate and 
from which we must turn back in despair. But, 
while it confesses this truth, it redeems Agnosticism 
from absolute hopelessness in its presentation of a 
God whose nature is such as that He can make 
Himself known to men if He so chooses. For a 
being whose nature is triune is capable of self- 
manifestation. To such a being a two-fold life is 
not an impossibility. In the life that He lives in 
the Son He can and does live in the world. In this 
mood of His being He became incarnate and bridged 
the chasm between heaven and earth, between the 
finite and the infinite. In a word, the doctrine of 
the trinity enables us to see in Jesus the transcend- 
ent God with us and in us. It recognizes in Jesus 
the Almighty restraining Himself and subordi- 
nating to Himself His illimitable power. It sees 
in Jesus the incomprehensible stooping to make 
Himself known to men. It sees in Jesus the Eternal 
Wisdom speaking out of the depths of infinite 
thought in human language. 



THK TRINITY. 287 

And what shall I say even of Polytheism, which 
in its nobler forms and in its own dark way wit- 
nesses for a truth which a hard Monotheism ignores 
the truth, namely, that God is a plurality as well 
as a unity ; that in Him there is a manifoldness of 
life, a fulness and diversity of powers and manifes- 
tations which a rigid Monotheism fails to provide. 
Is not even this element of truth for which Poly- 
theism stands also taken up and put in its proper 
relation to the unity of God in its doctrine of the 
trinity and triunity in the Divine nature ? 

Well, does not this fact, that the doctrine of the 
trinity, when rightly apprehended, absorbs into 
itself all that is true in human thought, vindicate 
the claim made for it a moment ago, when I affirmed 
that it presented to thought a universal formula ? 
For what great and vital truth is there in any 
serious system from the day of Plato to Hegel that 
is not taken up and given a larger meaning in this 
very doctrine ? In the words of Samuel Harris : 
" No doctrine of God has so satisfactorily resolved 
into unity the dualisms, and the seeming antinomies 
arising in every attempt to construct a theory of 
the universe and to grasp the idea of the Absolute. 
None has ever so completely comprehended the 



288 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

bipolar and complemental truths in the vast idea of 
the Absolute Being and His relation to the finite, 
as the docrine of the trinity." Coleridge had all 
the truth on his side when he affirmed that " The 
article of the Trinity is reason in its universal 
formula ; that there is not nor can be any religion, 
any reason, but what is an expression of the truth 
of the trinity." 

But the Christian doctrine of the trinity and 
unity in the Divine nature not only furnishes to 
thought a universal formula, it also presents to 
hope a sure ground for the redemption of the world. 
And it does this for the reason that it finds the basis 
of redemption in the Divine nature itself. Because 
of what God is ; because His very essence is Love, 
redemption ceases to be a mere hope and becomes a 
moral necessity. 

And man's need of redemption is part of his con- 
sciousness. In the presence of the evil that is 
about him and in him, he feels himself powerless. 
It is this fact of universal evil that has saddened 
the lives of the noblest among men and women 
everywhere, and evoked the bitter cry, " Oh, 
wretched man that I am ; who shall deliver me 
from this body of death ? " And what is true of 



THE TRINITY. 289 

man is also true of nature. For what has come to 
him has also come to it. Both are alike victims of 
evil, and mingled with his are the groans of a suf- 
fering creation, crying for deliverance. And then, 
too, wherever confidence in the future has inspired 
the soul ; wherever man has watched in hope for 
the morning, it has been because of his belief in 
the Divine interestedness, and the hope that sooner 
or later God would send help out of His sanctuary. 
But what if God is indifferent to our sorrows, as 
Deism teaches ? What if He be too great or too far 
removed to afford His help, as Agnosticism affirms ? 
What if, on account of His nature, He is incapable 
of sympathy, as Pantheism and Materialism alike 
hold ? Or what if He be a self -identical Deity, a 
being whose nature, on account of its very single- 
ness, is incapable of love, as absolute Monotheism 
affirms ? What hope is there then left for the re- 
demption of the world, or what refuge is there 
against the ills of existence except Stoicism, with 
its resignation to the evils of existence, from which 
there is no way of escape? It is the Christian 
conception of God as triune that awakens hope ; 
that makes the religion of Jesus a gospel as well as 
the mightiest of the forces that work for the better- 
19 



29O THE NATURE OF GOD. 

ment of men. And for this there are two reasons. 

The first is found in the fact that the doctrine of 
the trinity establishes the certainty that God in the 
innermost of His nature is love. Not that His 
threeness makes Him a loving God, or, if you 
please, a Being to whom love is a relative and 
secondary attribute, contingent on His relation to 
His creatures. The doctrine makes Him a Being 
whose very essence is love ; a Being for whose name 
love is the only possible synonym. And there is a 
vast difference between the conception of a loving 
God and that of a God whose essence is love. The 
former makes love itself contingent and transient. 
The latter makes it absolute, and the eternal cause 
of all. The one leaves the world unintelligible, 
cold, hopeless. The other makes it a world, amidst 
the mysteries of which we can move with confi- 
dence, knowing that all is well, and whose unsolved 
problems we can face with hope. The one is the 
highest guess of unassisted thought ; the other, the 
very nerve of that faith that has given hope and 
guaranteed redemption to the world. 

But how can we think of love as absolute and as 
distinct from a love that is merely contingent, ex- 
cept in the light of the conception of a plurality of 



THE TRINITY. 29 1 

persons in the Godhead? Love is self-communi- 
cation to another. There cannot be love without 
an object to love. Accordingly, to affirm that God 
is eternally love, is to confess that He has from 
eternity an object of love. Nor does it meet the 
case to say that such an object is presented in the 
world. Eternal love demands an eternal object to 
make it real, and the world is not eternal. But 
what, then, can be the object of God's love through- 
out eternity, if it be not found in the plurality of 
persons eternally existing in the Godhead ? Apart 
from such a trinity of persons and the relations 
which such a trinity implies, God cannot be a God 
of love. Existing alone and in barren singleness, 
apart from someone upon whom from all eternity 
to expend His love, someone in whom He beholds 
Himself reflected, God is not from eternity love. In 
that case His Fatherhood, His love, are mere acces- 
sions to His being, and are not parts of His essen- 
tial nature. In the words of John Caird : " God 
cannot be without love. Eove implies a second, 
and the world is no second for God. That second 
must be eternal — that is, within the Divine nature." 
And so it comes that to think of God as love is 
of necessity to think of Him as triune. It is to see 



292 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

in the innermost of His being that community of 
persons which the doctrine of the trinity in the 
Divine nature affirms, and apart from which He 
cannot be eternal love. Think of it as we may, it 
is the Christian doctrine of the trinity in the Divine 
nature that redeems the conception of God from 
that barren and infinite singleness with which 
philosophy vests it. It is this very threeness that 
vindicates the Christian position that the Divine 
Being as to His innermost nature is love, the in- 
tensest, the mightiest, the holiest thing that we 
know. From such a God we shall not hope in vain 
for redemption. 

But while the trinity of persons in the Godhead 
thus fixes the ground of redemption in the Divine 
nature itself, it also provides the means for its actual 
accomplishment in time. 

Let us not overlook the fact that a redeeming 
God must of necessity be triune. A Deity abso- 
lutely single as to His nature is by that very single- 
ness rendered incapable of redeeming a world unto 
Himself. It is so for the reason that redemption 
requires a Deity at once transcendent and imma- 
nent ; a being to whom existence in the world and 
apart from it are alike possible. 



THE TRINITY. 293 

For redemption is not a change in our environ- 
ment or even in our attitude to God. It is nothing 
less than a transformation of the very inmost, the 
remaking of the entire personality, and its con- 
struction anew out of the moral substance of God. 
It is not that merely ideal union of God and man of 
which philosophy fondly speaks. The oneness of the 
redeemed soul with God is real and actual, a unity 
growing out of the oneness of its moral essence with 
His. No one is truly redeemed until, speaking of 
the power that dominates him, he is able to say, 
"It is no longer I, but God dwelling within me." 
In a word, to be made one with God, to be in- 
habited by Him, this it is to be redeemed. 

And that means that for our redemption God 
must unite Himself with the race and become in- 
carnate in human flesh. In the person of the Only 
Begotten, He must needs travel the pathway that 
leads through Bethlehem, in order that by assuming 
our nature He might unite it with the Divine. But 
while assuming ours, He must not part with His 
own. In the moment of His deepest humiliation, 
He must, as Redeemer, remain the eternal and tran- 
scendent. Otherwise He cannot form a perfect 
bond of union between man and God. In order 



294 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

that such a real union may be effected He must 
needs be a member of the race and yet distinct from 
it, absolutely and fully God at the moment that He 
is truly man. In other words, the relation which as 
Redeemer He must sustain to the world must be 
that of transcendence as well as immanence. He 
must exist above the world and yet in it. See how 
this comes. 

It will not be denied that in the carrying forward 
of the work of redemption God must dwell within 
the individual soul. Because the new life begotten 
within by the Holy Spirit is not our own but God's, 
He must live within us. And this occupation of the 
entire field of our nature by God is the end sought 
by the Holy Spirit. " Behold, I stand at the door 
and knock," says Jesus. " If any man hear my 
voice and open the door, I will come in and sup 
with him and he with me." It is, as you see, an 
admission on His part that He cannot accomplish 
His work from without ; that if we are to be made 
one in moral essence and in innermost life with 
God, the old self must be cast out and its place oc- 
cupied by another. It is not enough that the re- 
deeming God stand aloof, in infinite and sublime 
transcendence. He must dwell within, live within, 



THE TRINITY. 295 

if He is to control and reform us in the springs of 
our being. 

And then, too, in his moral struggles man needs 
a pattern. In the shaping of our characters we re- 
quire an objective exhibition of what we are to be. 
For this reason, also, the One in whose image we 
have been created, and into whose likeness we are 
to be fashioned, must present Himself as the Divine 
ideal. He must be for us the pattern shown in the 
mount. And this ideal must, in the nature of the 
case, be a concrete one. It must present itself 
under all the phases of our varied and complex ex- 
periences. No private or personal conception of 
what we are to be is sufficient. All such concep- 
tions are inadequate, for the reason that we cannot 
see ourselves as we really are, or rightly estimate 
the breadth of the chasm that ever yawns between 
what we are and what we must be. 

And this is to say that for humanity, a perfect 
pattern must be a living one, it must be set forth 
in the ideal man. He must be one in nature with 
us, touch us shoulder to shoulder, be our companion 
in all our experiences, be tempted as we are, yet 
without sin. No ideal, or merely human pattern, 
has vitality enough to awaken a desire to realize in 



296 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

ourselves its moral beauty. No other than a living 
and perfect man has power to woo us by the spell 
of a life controlled entirely by the indwelling God. 
Before such an objective and living ideal man must 
stand, before there will be heard from the depths of 
the soul the cry, " This is what I must be ; this is 
what I want to be." 

Well, just this is the power that the transcendent 
God, as brought near in Jesus, has always had upon 
the hearts of men. Beholding Him, the soul has 
felt itself overpowered, for in Him it has not only 
seen the ineffable beauty of God, but also the apoth- 
eosis of humanity. Indeed, so overpowering has 
been the vision of the King in His beauty, as that 
all who have truly beheld Him have also yearned 
to be in moral beauty what He was. 

And yet, paramount as may be this desire, does 
not our experience prove that alone and unaided it 
is utterly impossible for us to realize it? Jesus 
stands there on the heights ; we here in the 
valley, weak and helpless. He the perfect ideal 
unto which we wish to attain ; ours the conscious- 
ness that its attainment is beyond our ability. 
Well, how is this difficulty to be overcome ? How 
are we to climb the heights of moral perfection to 



THE TRINITY. 297 

which Jesus woos us, and in so doing become like 
Him ? Is there any other way than the one which 
He Himself has opened — I mean the way indicated 
in the Scripture, in which the transcendent One in 
the person of the Spirit becomes also the imma- 
nent ; in which the One who is above is made to 
dwell within, and by His indwelling vest us with 
a power which is not our own but His ? 

One day in the gallery of Antwerp there sat an 
amateur painter before one of the masterpieces of 
Rubens. With easel and canvas and brush, he sat 
with soul transfigured before the great painting, 
striving to reproduce it. But somehow, he could 
not tell why, he could not accomplish the task. 
The colors refused to blend, the outline remained 
imperfect, the painting could not be made to live. 
And little wonder ; for the one who executed the 
masterpiece possessed genius. To him color and 
brush were alike servants. He painted with ease, 
for he painted with inspiration, he knew not how. 
Yet it was the reproduction of this work that the 
young artist attempted. But, after repeated fail- 
ures, he gave up in despair. " I cannot do this ; 
I cannot do it," he said. "It is utterly beyond my 
power, I ought never to have attempted it." Well, 



298 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

suppose that out of the unseen there could at that 
moment have come into the soul of the young artist 
the spirit of the master. Suppose that the genius 
who had conceived and executed the masterpiece 
could have entered and possessed the soul of the 
young painter. Would he not by virtue of such 
indwelling have been made equal to the task ? 

I own the weakness of the illustration. I own 
that it does not tell in any adequate degree the full 
relation of the Divine Spirit to the human soul. I 
own that in the case of the human spirit all this 
would be impossible. No finite spirit can thus fill 
and actuate the spirit of another. But a Divine 
Spirit can. It is altogether within the ability of a 
Being who knows no limits to the exercise of His 
power save those of the human will. Because of the 
richness of His triune nature it is possible for Him 
to maintain a relation at once transcendent and im- 
manent, to dwell graciously within at the moment 
that He moves omnipotently without. And just 
this indwelling Spirit, whose work it is to create us 
anew after the Divine pattern, and in so doing to 
glorify Christ, was the promise of Jesus, when 
speaking of the Spirit, He said, " And if I depart I 
will send Him unto vou." 



THE TRINITY. 299 

Well, now, does it need to be said that the ability 
to thus exist in three persons, and which we have 
just seen is an indispensable requirement of a re- 
deeming God, cannot be the possession of a being 
whose innermost nature is a unit? Does it need 
to be said that a power such as this is the possession 
of that One alone in whose nature there are distinc- 
tions, and who, on that account, without doing vio- 
lence to His unity, is capable of a threefold mode 
of existence ? For how is a Deity whose nature is 
a fixed unit, without inner distinctions and whose 
existence is, on that account, confined to a single 
mood ; how is such a one to live at once within and 
apart from His creatures ? Or what would become 
of the transcendent existence of such a one at the 
moment that He becomes immanent? Would He 
not at that moment cease to be the transcendent, and 
would not the universe be deprived of its absolute 
God ? Or what, on the contrary, would become of 
His immanent existence at the moment of His tran- 
scendence ? Would it not be made impossible ? 
One or the other of the Divine modes of existence 
essential to redemption must be sacrificed if the 
Deity be a monad, a mere unit, without inward and 
personal distinctions. 



300 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

And this is the reason why no rigid system of 
Monotheism has ever had room for the incarnation, 
or the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. Judaism, 
with its self-identical Deity, denied both. Moham- 
medanism, with its Deity whose glory consists in 
His absolute and barren singleness, repudiated both. 
To the Patrapassian both were a stumbling-block, 
and to the Arian they were foolishness. At last, a 
Deity in whose nature there are personal distinc- 
tions, a Deity who lives His life in three persons, and 
who, on that account, is capable of existing above 
the world and also in it, alone has power to redeem. 
Such a Deity and such alone is able to unite Him- 
self with the race, and by so doing unite it with 
God. 

Thus, when the doctrine of the Trinity is consid- 
ered, not from the standpoint of its theoretical sig- 
nificance, but from its practical side alone, its su- 
preme value to the world is at once apparent. No 
truth has been of such value to thought. None has 
so vindicated the ways of God to men, or given to 
hope so sure a basis. If our newest philosophy 
is right in its contention that the most cogent and 
apposite proof of any particular item of our knowl- 
edge is that of its practical value to the world, then 



THE TRINITY. 3OI 

is the truth of the Trinity in God abundantly con- 
firmed, for no truth has been of equal value to 
men. 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 

In the present lecture we are to look into the 
ground upon which the doctrine of the Trinity 
itself rests. For those of us who are not philoso- 
phers, mere " value judgments " are not a sufficient 
guarantee of truth. We prefer the certainties of 
history and experience. We want, if possible, to 
feel the ground beneath our feet and to rest our be- 
liefs on reality. But is this possible in respect of 
the doctrine of the Trinity ? And is there any as- 
surance that we are not at last dealing with a mere 
theory ? I think an inquiry into the origin and his- 
tory of the doctrine will afford an answer to these 
questions. 

For how came this great truth of the Trinity 

and Unity in the Divine nature to be accepted as 

an important part of our religious knowledge? 

How came it to be regarded as so vital an element 

in the Christian consciousness as to command a 

place in the confession of Protestant and Catholic 

alike throughout the world? You will find the 

answer in two things : 

(302) 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 303 

First, in the origin of the doctrine itself. 

Second, in the witness of experience to its truth. 

Let us not overlook the fact that the doctrine had 
its origin not in philosophical speculation, but in 
actual and undeniable facts of history ; facts to 
which no intellectual or scientific interpretation 
could possibly be given without arriving at the 
doctrine. 

It was in the three ways of Father, Son and 
Spirit, that God had manifested Himself in history. 
Centuries before Christ came, God was made known 
in the Fatherly relation that He bore to the He- 
brew people. Over against Polytheism, He was 
first known as the sole God of Israel, and then as 
the sole God of all. By those to whom the revela- 
tion came, He was conceived as the creator and 
sustainer of all things — the One to whom worship 
was to be given and filial obedience rendered. To 
them He was made known as the defender of His 
people and the One to whom they were to look for 
the supply of their every need. To Him, as a 
gracious and forgiving Father, they were taught to 
trustfully resort, in the full assurance that they 
would be forgiven. In the pity that He felt for 
those who feared Him, they saw the likeness that 



304 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

He sustained to an earthly father, and in His uni- 
versal and paternal government, they saw the ful- 
fillment of their hopes for the world. While the 
revelation was gradual and progressive, and the 
actual conception of God in the minds of men was 
but partial and imperfect, yet the manifestation 
was such as that by its means men were taught to 
know the Living God as Father, and brought to 
serve Him in filial obedience. 

It is true, that before Christ, God was conceived 
as in every sense one. It could not have been 
otherwise. In the nature of the case, the threeuess 
in the Divine nature which the doctrine of the 
Trinity affirms, could only be foreshadowed in the 
Old Testament. Dependent as it was on the three- 
fold manifestation, it had to wait the fuller dis- 
closure that was afterward to be given in the life 
and person of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit. 
Even on the paternal side, the manifestation of God 
was not yet complete. It needed the incarnation of 
the Son, in order that the infinite richness of the 
Fatherly relation might be fully brought out. It 
needed that One should come into the world who 
sustained the relation of Son to God, in order that 
the wealth of the Divine Fatherhood might be dis- 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 305 

closed and the loving relation, into which as Father, 
He desired to enter into with all men, might be 
correctly and concretely exhibited. 

And this complete manifestation of the Father 
was in the fulness of time afforded in Jesus. Claim- 
ing for Himself the unique relation of Son to God, 
the truth of His claim was owned by all who were 
brought into fellowship with Him. As God, Jesus 
was worshiped, and to Him prayer was offered. In 
Him the disciples were certain that they beheld 
the only true God, though disclosed in a way differ- 
ent from that in which He had manifested Himself 
to the fathers. But while seeing in Him the 
true God, Jesus did not displace for them the Father 
who had sent Him. They still thought of God ; 
but they thought of Him as the " God and Father 
of Jesus Christ." Jesus was to them God brought 
nigh and manifested in human form. He was God 
dwelling among men, sustaining to them the rela- 
tion of companion and friend. 

But just because Jesus was Son, He also enlarged 
their conceptions of the Father. In the loving rela- 
tions existing between Him and the Father, they 
not only learned the infinite richness of the Divine 
Fatherhood, but also the relations into which 



306 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

through the Son all might sustain to God. The 
Church was sure that God was in Christ as He was 
in no other ; that His manifestation in Jesus was 
not like any that He had made through Moses, or 
Isaiah, or the prophets, but was unique and effected 
by the personal indwelling that made Him truly 
Divine. 

Thus, in the twofold manifestation of the one 
God, as Father and as Son, was the foundation laid 
for the doctrine of the Trinity. It is accordingly 
not with a philosophical theory that we have to do, 
but, .on the contrary, with a fact of history ; for it was 
in actual history that the twofold modes of the 
divine existence were made known. 

But while the manifestation of the Father and 
the Son proved a duality in the Divine nature, 
it did not establish the fact of a Trinity in 
the Godhead. Before that could be established, 
a manifestation of God in yet another way was 
necessary. And this, I need hardly tell you, was 
afforded on the Day of Pentecost. It was on that 
day that the faith of the disciples in the prom- 
ise of Jesus, that He would send the Comforter, 
even the Spirit of truth, was rewarded in the com- 
ing of the Holy Spirit. And when He came the 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 7>°7 

fulness of the Triune God was fully disclosed. The 
marvelous energy of that convincing and renewing 
power which thenceforth dwelt in the Church and 
wrought upon the world, was enough to identify 
the Holy Spirit as God Himself, indwelling, worthy 
to be adored and worshiped with the Father and the 
Son. As God Himself had come in the Son, so, it 
was felt, He had come in the Spirit. The one God 
of all, known to the fathers, had manifested Him- 
self in the divine-human Christ, and in the invis- 
ible Spirit of truth and life. Both were His, and 
yet each was truly Himself. 

But what was thus made known in the actual 
events of history was also confirmed in the experi- 
ence of the disciples. The God who had given to 
men a threefold manifestation of Himself, was also 
known to be triune in the experience that came 
through fellowship with Him. It was the one 
God, into communion with whom they had been 
brought through each of the manifested Persons. 
In the experience of salvation into which they 
were brought through fellowship with Jesus, the 
disciples knew the Father and the Spirit, for it was 
in this fellowship that both were brought nigh and 
made real. It was in this fellowship that the prom- 



308 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

ise that He had made concerning the coming of 
the Spirit was realized, and His words, " He that 
hath seen me hath seen the Father," confirmed. 

And just this is the meaning of the Apostle's 
prayer at the end of the second letter to the Cor- 
inthians — " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and 
the love of God and the communion of the Holy 
Spirit be with you all." He was speaking out of 
experience and invoking the gifts that were charac- 
teristic of the Christian life. It was the grace of 
the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose cross he gloried 
and whose heavenly gifts were making all things 
new, that had opened to him and to them the infi- 
nite riches of the love of God, and introduced 
them to the unspeakably precious communion of 
the Holy Spirit. And Paul wanted that this ex- 
perience should be continued ; that Christ might 
still bring home to His people the love of God and 
the Spirit's fellowship. And this is ever the power 
and the prerogative of Christ. The grace that is 
in Him does bring to glorious effect in men, the 
love of God and the communion of the Spirit. It 
is this fact, made known in the experience of every 
believer, that justifies the conviction that in Jesus 
dwelt " the fulness of the Godhead bodily." 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 309 

Such, then, was the origin of the doctrine of the 
Trinity. It was not a product of human thinking 
about God. Philosophy had no part in it. Natural 
religion could not have conceived it. It came into 
the world through revelation. It had its origin in 
actual facts, facts that could not be disputed. As 
three, God had made Himself known, and as such 
the experience of all who believed the manifesta- 
tions proved Him to be. This was the Trinity of 
the early Church. It was all that was needed in 
an age of unquestioning faith — a faith that finds 
its analogue in childhood, when facts are accepted 
and experiences enjoyed, without a critical inquiry 
into their nature or meaning. L,et us own, that 
thought had not yet given to these facts and experi- 
ences an intellectual setting ; that the doctrine of 
the Trinity had not as yet assumed the scientific 
form in which it was afterward presented in the 
creed. The facts and the experiences were enough 
for the practical necessities which were then at the 
front. A simple belief in the Father, Son and 
Spirit, apart from any intellectual construction, was 
all that was necessary for the Church yet in its 
infancy, and whose life was not as yet threatened by 
heresies. Nevertheless, when thought did its work, 



3IO THE NATURE OF GOD. 

as it had to do it, and the attempt was made to 
understand and justify the experience that came to 
the Church, the material out of which the doctrine 
was constructed was already given in actual his- 
tory and its truth confirmed in actual experience. 
Nothing was introduced into the intellectual state- 
ment that was not already given in history and 
Christian experience. 

But at this point we are confronted by the ques- 
tion, How can God be three and yet one ? What 
threeness can there be in a unipersonal Being? It 
is a question which, at some point or other, is cer- 
tain to present itself in our study of the doctrine 
of the Trinity. Apparently it presents a real diffi- 
culty. And yet the difficulty is one that arises out 
of a misunderstanding of terms rather than the 
truth itself. To think rightly of God is, indeed, 
to think of Him as three in Person, yet one in 
essence. It is to think of Him as a unipersonal 
Being, eternally existing in the three distinctions 
of Father, Son and Spirit. But, while God is three, 
His threeness is not that of three distinct indi- 
viduals or personalities. When we speak of a 
threeness in the divine nature, we must distinguish 
sharply between the terms personality and person. 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 311 

The terms are not synonymous. When we use the 
term personality, we have in mind a distinct indi- 
vidual. When we use the term person in the sense 
in which it is used in the creed, we mean by it, one 
or the other, of the three distinctions existing in 
the one God. The Father is a Person ; the Son is 
a Person ; the Spirit is a Person. Yet the three 
together constitute the one personal God. 

It will not, I think, be denied that the term Per- 
son as applied to the three separate members of the 
Trinity, is in our times quite unfortunate. In its 
modern sense it differs widely from the sense which 
it carried in the age in which the creed was for- 
mulated. Then the term was helpful, for the reason 
that it bore a looser and more flexible meaning. 
But, at present, amid the more clear-cut conceptions 
of personality, its use is almost certain to give 
encouragement to tritheistic belief. The three Per- 
sons of the Trinity are persons in the ancient sense 
of the term, but not in the modern. When first 
employed in the discussions, it carried with it a 
meaning much the same as the word " character " 
now has in the modern drama. In the modern 
sense of the term, it was not meant that there are 
three Persons in the Godhead ; but, rather, that 



312 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

there are three modes, or ways, in which this one 
Personality exists and manifests Himself. It is 
largely for the reason that we are under the spell 
of a word now no longer used in its original sense, 
and unconsciously seek to find three modernly-con- 
ceived persons in the Godhead, that we find the 
doctrine of the Trinity so difficult. The moment we 
give to the term Person the meaning that it origi- 
nally had, much of the difficulty disappears. 

Something like this, then, is the conception to 
which the Nicene formula sought to give expres- 
sion. God is a Person ; one in essence, yet exist- 
ing in three distinct ways. Of this one essence the 
Father, Son and Spirit are alike possessed, yet in 
different ways. The oneness of essence in each 
constitutes the unity, the three ways in which it is 
possessed constitute the Trinity. The doctrine, 
accordingly, is not that of one nature and three 
Persons ; but of one nature in three Persons. 

Thus, when rightly interpreted, the doctrine of 
the Trinity loses much of its difficulty. I do not 
mean that by a proper interpretation its mystery is 
completely eliminated ; but, rather, that by such 
interpretation the doctrine is rendered intelligible 
in spite of the mystery that must forever enshroud 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 313 

it to our finite minds. Yet it is well to remember 
that it is not the obscurity of the doctrine that 
puzzles us. It is the mystery of personality itself : 
for at last the mystery of the Trinity in God is one 
with the mystery of the trinity existing in our- 
selves as personal beings. 

But I must now call your attention to the answer 
that the doctrine of the Trinity gives to that old 
and persistent question, What is God ? For, what, 
let me ask, is this Trinitarian idea of God to which 
the Church in all ages has unitedly confessed, and 
which, on account of its fidelity to revelation and 
experience, makes it the norm of all correct think- 
ing about the divine Being ? Is it not a conception 
of God as a Personal Being — a Perfect Spirit, in 
whose nature there is a threeness ? In other words, 
is it not a presentation of God as a Person, in the 
sense in which we are persons, three as we are 
three, yet one as we are one ? I think it will be 
found that the idea of God as the Perfect Person 
includes all that the doctrine declares concerning 
the divine Unity and Trinity ; and that, contrari- 
wise, to affirm of God that He is Three in One and 
One in Three, is but to affirm His absolute and 
perfect personality. I^et us see how this position 
finds its justification in the facts. 



314 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

I own that the ground upon which we are about 
to tread is holy. That it is to be trodden, if at all, 
in a spirit of reverence and with our shoes removed 
from off our feet. Nevertheless, if we are in fact, 
and not only in name, children of God ; if our 
greatness consists in the fact that we are actually 
in possession of the Divine image ; and, if above all, 
we are in nature one with God as the Incarnation 
proves us to be ; then we have right to affirm that 
in our human is to be found the most perfect 
analogue of the Divine nature. If we are like Him, 
then He is also like us. A relation cannot be essen- 
tial on the one side, and only accidental or arbi- 
trary on the other. Accordingly, we may affirm 
that what as spiritual beings we are in part, God is 
in its completeness. What we are but imperfectly, 
He is in all the fulness of its actual realization. 

But when we reflect upon ourselves, we discover 
that we, as personal beings, are essentially three at 
the moment that we are one. That, while in a 
sense we are three, as God is three, yet, in another 
sense we are one, as He is one. Indeed, it will be 
found that from any adequate conception of our 
our own personality it is impossible to eliminate 
either the trinity or the unity, for both together 
constitute the personal spirit. 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 315 

For one thing, there is within us a threeness. 
The moment we enter into an analysis of self, we 
discover that we are not single ; but that, on the 
contrary, we live and act in three distinct moods. 
Your psychologist will tell you that the constituent 
elements of our personality as such are three, self- 
consciousness, the power of self-determination, and 
desires ; in other words, reason, will and love. And 
these are more than mere functions. They are essen- 
tial elements of our selfhood. Together they make 
the person. More than these there are not ; less there 
cannot be. These three elements express the sum 
total of all of our activities, for, in every moment of 
our self-conscious existence we live in one or the 
other of these three modes. Subtract either and 
you destroy the person. Here, then, we have a 
trinity. 

But, while we are certain that there exists within 
us a threeness, we are just as certain that as per- 
sonal beings we are one. For these three elements 
of reason, and will, and love, are, in fact, not separa- 
ble, although we give them separate names for the 
sake of distinction. In every act, whether of 
thought, or will, or love, the whole person is in- 
volved. We cannot, for instance, pursue a train of 



316 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

thought without attention. But attention is clearly 
an act of the will. We cannot think consecutively 
without desire. But desire is an act of the affec- 
tions. We cannot love, without thinking of the 
one we love, or without willing our relation to such 
a one. We cannot will without thinking of the 
object, or desiring its realization. And thus, in 
every act, whether of will, or thought, or love, the 
whole self is involved. While there is within us a 
threeness, yet we live and act as one. 

And, this is to say, that there is a synthetic unity 
in us as persons ; that there is not a numerical one- 
ness, but a spiritual unity in which the various 
elements of our complex personality are blended 
with an intimacy that defies analysis. As persons 
we are one in a sense in which we are not three, 
and three in a sense in which we are not one. And 
this trinity and unity, existing in us, and by virtue 
of which we are made personal, we possess because of 
our kinship with God. To be a child of God is to pos- 
sess His image, not, indeed, in that which is merely 
outward and accidental, but in that that belongs to 
the very innermost of His being. And so, reason- 
ing from analogy, we may conclude that in each of 
the three Persons that constitute the Trinity the 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 317 

whole Divine Person goes forth. As with ns, every 
conscious act involves the whole self, so with God. 
It is not a part of God that we behold in each of 
the Persons. God Himself is in the Father ; God 
Himself is in the Son ; God Himself is in the 
Spirit. In each of the Persons the whole God is, 
and in each, though differentiated in operation and 
purpose from the others, the one God lives and acts. 
It is the one God whom Christendom knows, one 
Person, who reveals Himself in the threefold Per- 
son. 

But how about those particular distinctions, of 
Father, Son and Spirit, in the Godhead, whose 
names seem to imply the existence of distinct per- 
sonalities, rather than different modes of existence 
of one and the same Being? Considered in the 
light of the trinity and unity existing in ourselves 
as personal beings, it is easy enough to see that as 
personal, God may be one and yet three. But here 
are names which seem to stand for living relations 
between distinct and separate personalities. Here 
are designations which in common speech belong 
to individuals, rather than to persons, in the sense 
in which we have defined the term. And what one- 
ness can there be between Father and Son? Or 



318 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

how are we to think of the Son as coequal and co- 
eternal with the Father ? 

L,et us own that, conceived in terms of our human 
relationship, this is impossible. Humanly speak- 
ing, the father precedes the son, the son derives his 
existence from the father and is subordinate to 
him. Clearly, if the unity of God is to be pre- 
served, some conception of sonship other than that 
derived from human relationship must be had. 

Well, it is just this higher conception of sonship 
that is presented in the Scripture and incorporated 
into the creed. Both present an idea of sonship 
stripped of all human limitations ; a conception of 
sonship in the light of which the full equality of 
the Divine Son with the Father becomes intelligible. 
See how it does this. 

You will recall that in the prologue to the 
fourth Gospel, it is affirmed of the Word that 
" He was in the beginning with God, and the 
Word was God." Here we have a distinction 
— God, and God with God. It is a distinction 
that is eternal and that pertains to the Divine 
nature. Not that we have here a Trinity, but we 
do have a distinction, a duality, if you please, in 
God. God, and God with God are not the same. It 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 319 

is a declaration that in the beginning God existed 
both as Father and Son. That as the all-perfect 
Person, from all eternity, God contemplated Him- 
self in Another, Himself in Himself. And so we 
may say that the Father is the source of the Son. 
In the Son, the Father sees Himself reflected. In 
the Son, God eternally goes forth, reproduces Him- 
self to Himself, utters Himself into reality, by 
action that is eternal and necessary to His nature. 

Well, now, is there not something in the action 
of the human soul that corresponds with this act 
of God's, in which He reproduces Himself in His 
Son ? And is it not true, that as personal beings 
we also reproduce ourselves ; or, in other words, 
objectify ourselves to ourselves? Indeed, were it 
not that we possess this very ability, we would not 
be personal, for it is just this power in the subject 
of being an object to itself, or, as L,ocke states it, 
" Of considering itself and saying, ' I am I,'" that 
constitutes our personality. See how this is. 

We have already agreed that the essence of per- 
sonality is self-consciousness. That to be a person 
is to be conscious of self as self. Where this con- 
sciousness is present, there is the person ; where it 
is absent, there is the impersonal. But how do we 



320 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

arrive at self-consciousness ? Is it not by objectify- 
ing ourselves to ourselves, and then by reflecting 
upon ourselves as thus objectified? We know per- 
fectly well how our knowledge of outward realities 
comes. We look outward on the world, open our- 
selves to the impressions which its objects make on 
the sense, and then reflect on the content as thus 
given. It is by means of such reflection that our 
knowledge of external things comes. But we could 
not possibly know them did they not present them- 
selves as objects distinct from ourselves. W T ell, in 
precisely the same way we arrive at self-conscious- 
ness, and learn to know ourselves as personal 
beings. In thought, we objectify ourselves to our- 
selves, reflect upon ourselves as thus presented, and 
out of such reflection knowledge of self comes. We 
speak, for instance, of " self-judgment ; " of " self- 
condemnation," of "self-approval." What do we 
mean by these phrases ? What can we mean other 
than that the self has power to summon itself be- 
fore its own bar in order that it may pass judgment 
upon itself as thus objectified ? Or what is remorse, 
but self-accusation — the self beholding itself and 
writhing under the sentence pronounced by no 
one other than self ? This is the tragedy of sin. 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 32 1 

This is the secret of an accusing conscience. It is 
the horrible vision of self that rises before Richard 
the Third that compels him to cry out : 

" O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me — 
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. 
Cold, fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. 
What do I fear? myself ? — there's none else by : 
Richard loves Richard : that is I, I am I. 
Is there a murderer here ? No ; — yes, I am. 
Then fly. What, from myself ? Great reason : why ? 
Lest I revenge. What ! Myself upon myself ? 
Alack ! I love myself. Wherefore ? for any good 
That I have done unto myself ? 
Oh, no : alas ! I rather hate myself 
For hateful deeds committed by myself. 
I am a villain. . . . 

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, 
And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
And every tale condemns me for a villain." 

Yes, we do make ourselves objects to ourselves, 
and the " I " of the subjective self does reflect on 
the "I" of the objective. This is the essence of 
self-consciousness ; this is the essential thing in 
personality. Now, it is true that in man this 
action through which we attain self-consciousness 
is always defective and its results but partial. We 
grope after the thought, and the vision of self comes 



322 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

but slowly and laboriously. We only gradually 
become self-conscious, and at any particular moment 
are but partly personal. But not so with God. 
" The same yesterday, to-day and forever," His 
self-consciousness is, in the nature of the case, eter- 
nal. There never is nor can be anything potential 
or undeveloped in God. The self-consciousness 
which in us is the result of deliberate effort, and 
which continues only during the time of voluntary 
self-reflection, is ever present and ever existent in 
God. 

And this is equivalent to saying, that in the case 
of the Perfect Person, what is but partially attained 
by us, and even then only in thought, will be attained 
completely and actually. Such a One will be able 
perfectly to objectify Himself to Himself, to see 
Himself just as He is, and in all that He is ; and, 
at the same moment, recognize the objective as 
identical with the subjective self. Well, it is just 
this power essential to personality and which is so 
imperfectly possessed by us that the doctrine of the 
Trinity affirms to be completely possessed by God. 
It affirms that as Father God perpetually beholds 
Himself objectified in the Son ; while, as Holy 
Spirit, He unremittently perceives the essential 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 323 

unity and identity of the Father and the Son. But 
a Being possessed of the power thus to perfectly ob- 
jectify self and to completely identify the objective 
with the subjective self, can be no other than the 
Perfect Person. 

Well, this was the thought that the Nicene 
Fathers sought to express in the phrase, " Eternal 
Generation," as applied to the Son. Not that they 
thought of the Son as dependent for His existence 
upon the Father, as is the case in human genera- 
tion. Against this they carefully guarded in the 
phrase, " Begotten, not made." They thought of 
the Son as coequal and coeternal with the Father. 
They saw clearly that an Eternal Father necessi- 
tated an Eternal Son, and that since the Father 
is eternal so also must be the Son. What they 
meant by the phrase, " eternal generation " was 
this : that in some manner God eternally repro- 
duces Himself within Himself, goes forth into 
reality, and thus is eternally the source of the 
Son. But a Being possessed of the power thus to 
eternally reproduce Himself, to behold Himself in 
all that He is in Another — Himself in Himself, is 
none other than the Perfect Person. Such a One 
is in the fullest sense Self-conscious, and to be per- 



324 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

fectly self-conscious is to be completely personal. 
And this is to say that the doctrine of the Trinity 
and Triunity in the Divine nature, completely 
establishes the fact of the Divine personality. For 
how could God from all eternity be conscious of 
Himself as Father if He had not from eternity dis- 
tinguished Himself from Himself in the Son, or if 
He had not been as eternally one with the Son in 
the unity of the Spirit ? Or how is it possible to 
conceive of God as eternally self-conscious without 
thinking of Him as eternally making Himself His 
own object ? 

Such, then, is the answer that the Nicene creed 
gives to that most important question, How are we 
to think of God? Confessing Him as one in 
essence, yet eternally existing in the three dis- 
tinctions of Father, Son and Spirit, it also confesses 
His perfect self-conscious personality. It but 
reaffirms and emphasizes the statement of the 
Scripture that u God is a Spirit." What as spir- 
itual beings we are but imperfectly, God is in 
the realized fulness of its infinite perfection. And 
this answer, necessitated though it was by the 
heresies that sought to prevent its utterance and to 
distort its meaning, reaffirmed by the Council of 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 325 

Constantinople in the year 381, has now for more 
than fifteen centuries been the reply that the Church 
has made to this same question. In her theology, 
in her ritual and in all of her utterances, she has 
unitedly confessed the Trinity in Unity and the 
Unity in Trinity, as the best expression of the 
nature of God as made known to men through his- 
tory and experience. 

But is it not marvelous that a conception of God 
so simple, yet so consonant with thought as oft to 
have been mistaken for a product of philosophy ; 
so true to experience, yet so rich in its intellectual 
content, should have come into -the world in the 
way in which it did ? That it has made the world 
immeasurably richer, no one acquainted with the 
facts will deny. For what has it not done for truth, 
for thought and for life ? It has given to thought 
a "universal formula" for the solution of the 
problems with which it has grappled in vain. De- 
spite its mysteriousness, it has made God more in- 
telligible to men and has helped to bring Him 
nearer to the hearts of His children. In the light 
that it has thrown on the Divine nature, it has 
made the Incarnation intelligible, and vindicated 
the hope that looks for the redemption of the world. 



326 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

While conserving all that is true in thought about 
God, it has also stood as a bulwark against error 
and preserved the faith pure until now. Above all, 
it has effectually established the perfect Personality 
of the Divine Being, and, by so doing, has brought 
God nigh as the friend and companion of all who 
diligently seek Him. 

But how, let me ask again, came this idea into 
the world? There is but one answer. It came 
through history and experience. Philosophy had 
no part in it. Natural theology never discovered 
it. The men who first proclaimed it were the un- 
lettered fishermen of Galilee : men whose training 
had not been received in the schools of Alexandria 
or Athens, but, on the contrary, in daily fellowship 
with Jesus. But they were men who knew of a 
certainty that God had revealed Himself and entered 
their experience in three ways ; that He had made 
Himself known to them as Father, Redeemer and 
Sanctifier. And when afterward the command 
came to make disciples of all nations, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy 
Spirit, they understood that they were but to 
proclaim that " which was from the beginning ; 
which they had seen with their eyes ; which they 



THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 327 

had looked upon, and, with their own hands, 
had handled of the word of life." It was a 
vital part of the gospel which they were sent to 
preach. It was more : for just this threefold mani- 
festation of the one God in history and experience 
is the very substance of Christianity. 

And this truth, first proclaimed in the simple 
story of the gospel, and afterward restated in a 
more concise and scientific form in the creed, is 
yet repeated in the experience of all who truly 
know God. To all such the Eternal God is still 
Father, Redeemer and Sanctifier — a Being who, in 
creation and providence, reveals His eternal Love 
as Father, whose eternal Reason utters itself forth 
through the Son, through Whom the world has 
been redeemed and whose eternal Will is executed 
by the Spirit, whose mission it is to bring into 
practical effect the love of the Father and the wis- 
dom of the Son by fulfilling the loving purpose of 
the One God. In God the eternal heart of Love ; 
in Christ the rational expression of the eternal 
heart ; and in the Spirit, the accomplisher of the 
work of both, the universal Church recognizes the 
One God whom she joyfully worships. And in the 
Being in whom eternal Wisdom, eternal Love and 



328 THE NATURE OF GOD. 

eternal Will unite, she also beholds the Perfect 
Per s 07t — the self-conscious Iyord of all, to whom, as 
Father, Son and Spirit, she ascribes present and 
eternal praise. 

GLORY BE TO THE FATHER, AND TO THE SON, AND 

To the Holy Ghost ; as it was in the beginning, 

IS NOW, AND EVER SHAU, BE, WORLD WITHOUT END. — AMEN. 



JUM 7- 1910 



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